Responsive Website vs Mobile Website
The growth of mobile device users has seen a tremendous growth in recent years. According to data from IDC in 2013, smartphone vendors shipped 1 billion smartphones worldwide. Smartphones have a share of 31.4% of the total mobile phones worldwide. What was surprising was that in 2012 there was a growth of 300 million units with an average growth of 38.4%.
Currently personal computers (desktops and notebooks) no longer dominate in accessing web content. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones also have a large population in accessing website content, browsing, socializing, shopping, transacting. Players in the world of information technology such as news portal sites, blogs, social media, corporate web sites flock to go mobile.
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According to the Mashable website in August 2013, 17.4 percent of global web traffic comes from mobile devices and this number will continue to grow until 2014. This means that almost 1/5 of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, will this trend continue in the future? keep going or slow down. No one can know for sure, what is clear is that this trend is ongoing.
In this paper, I want to share about the phenomenon of the extraordinary growth of this mobile device which is related to the website, namely responsive websites and mobile websites. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages between the two. The source of my writing is taken from several blogs that discuss responsive web design and mobile websites.
What Are Responsive Websites and Mobile Websites
Responsive Website
A responsive website is a website that can adjust its layout based on the viewport size of the device used, starting from a smartphone, tablet or computer screen. A responsive website can provide an optimal experience for users with minimal resizing, scrolling and panning. The development of mobile device technology so rapidly gave birth to mobile devices with different screen sizes with so varied brands. Smartphones produced by various vendors have size variants. With a responsive website, the website can adjust to the viewport size of the accessing device.
Mobile Website
Mobile websites in principle are the same as websites in general, which are made with HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP. But the difference is that the mobile website is made to be optimal for the screen size of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. When we access a web that is made for a computer/laptop desktop screen using a mobile device, there will be horizontal scrolling and zooming which of course disturbs the user’s comfort (bad user experience). With a mobile website, of course, there will be no more problems with horizontal scrolling and zooming.
With the phenomenon of the growth of mobile devices, content providers feel the need to create separate websites, namely websites for desktop users and mobile web for mobile users. However, since the idea of responsive web design by Ethan Marcotte, there has been a new trend in the form of the idea of one website for all devices. Although it is inseparable from the pros and cons of the idea of one website for all devices among web professionals, here we will look at the advantages and disadvantages.
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Advantages
Responsive Website
Having a responsive website means that you only have 1 website but it can be accessed by various devices with different screen sizes
Having only 1 website means ease of maintenance
By only having 1 website, it is certainly more cost-effective
By only having 1 only need 1 domain address
By only having 1 website, you don’t need additional efforts and costs for marketing, it’s different if you have a responsive website as well as a mobile website
Mobile Website
Creating a mobile website is not as complicated as making a responsive website
For news and website publications, we can customize so that the most updated news, only important news is displayed on the mobile website
Designed from the start to be accessed via smartphones with relatively small screens, so that users will get the maximum user experience
Deficiency
Responsive Website
Longer loading time than mobile web, because responsive web must load all existing images and scripts
Disturbing the placement of ad banners, the position of the ad banner will obviously be affected by the responsive nature of the web that adjusts its layout based on the screen size of the device. As we know many blogs, web news that rely on revenue from advertising
Responsive website development requires higher costs due to the complexity involved in responsive websites
Mobile Website
With a mobile website means that it must have two different URLs. For example, a mobile website has a URL that starts with the letter m. We can take an example: www.