Welcome to the second part of our series, in this post we'll be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using both a responsive website and a stand-alone mobile website as your businesses or websites main mobile platform.

To briefly re-cap last week's post; a responsive website is a website that will adjust its layout according to the users resolution (size of screen), through media queries in the cascading style-sheet – in other words, if you access the website joeshmoe.com on your desktop and your iPhone , the website will detect and load the website on your desktop as a larger version then it would on your iPhone (the desktop might have a 3 column layout, whereas on the iPhone it might have a 1 column layout).

The mobile website is a completely separate entity to the main website. It is built up of its own images and content, and typically has its own subdomain or website folder such as follows:

• mobile.joeshmoe.com
• m.joeshmoe.com
• joeshmore.com/mobile

If you are still a little lost on the two topics above, feel free to re-visit Part I before reading further. Now, on to the advantages and disadvantages of the Responsive website …

Advantages of Responsive Websites:

• Website will adjust and work on many different mobile devices.
• You only have to update the content in one place (the main website); once a change has been made it will automatically be changed on the mobile versions of the website.
• You will not have to worry about having to scroll (left to right) because the website layout has been designed to display at your devices resolution, the website will automatically adjust.
• Simplified navigation for "thumb users".
• Your website will be ready for any new technology trends immediately because it is self-adjusting to resolution sizes.
• Centralized link authority (which means SEO page ranks for landing pages will not be counted as two different pages, it will be considered 1 single page)

Disadvantages of Responsive Websites:

• The content will remain the same as the full website version; This means you can not customize the content for mobile users.
• If your website is content heavy and wordy, users will have to scroll a lot with their devices to read content.
• If website has large images, loading it on a mobile device will take up more bandwidth because it is downloading the website content first than applying layout adjustments.
• It automatically asserts that a user on a mobile device wants to use a mobile-friendly version of the website, whereas that user might want to see the full-site as they had once visited on their desktop.

Advantages to Mobile Websites:

• Customized appearance and content. You will be able to modify the content of the website so that mobile users are only getting mobile content.
• Instant Call button, which allows your mobile visitors to instantly call your contact number from their phones while visiting your website – instant access to customer support or reception.
• You can eliminate content that mobile users will most likely not view, clearing up clutter and making it easier for mobile users to navigate your website.
• Fast loading, because it is not loading the full-version websites images, it is loading smaller condensed images which take up less bandwidth.
• Simplified navigation for "thumb users".
• Allows users to choose between mobile or full-version website.

Disadvantages to Mobile Websites:

• You will have to update and maintain two separate sets of content.
• As cell phone technology changes, the design may have to be re-visited to support new resolutions.
• Decentralized link authority (which means that because you have duplicate content in two different locations on the server, search engines count that content twice as separate entities affecting page views and ranks – if not done properly)

There you have it, some of the major differences between a responsive and mobile website platform – next week we will be posting the third part of the series which will discuss how to best select between a responsive and stand alone mobile version depending on your project size and needs.

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