What is adaptive design?
Adaptive design and responsive design are very close concepts. Both the adaptive design and the responsive design work on the principle of self-regulation according to the device after determining the characteristics of the device used. Both design methods aim to improve the user experience by adapting to different screen sizes, usage conditions and requirements.
Adaptive Design has numerous fixed layout sizes. When this type of design is applied, special designs are created for different devices. Because each screen size requires a different design, it requires more time and labor. Adaptive design uses fixed dimensions, like "px" values.
What is responsive design?
Responsive design involves changing the look of a website to fit the device being viewed. In this way, the user experience is significantly improved. Responsive design does not offer as much control as adaptive design. Mobile compatibility is provided only by the same elements that fit different sizes. This is achieved by using relative, like "%" values, rather than fixed values of latitude values. For example, you encode the width of a column as 30%, not 200 pixels. In this case, the column occupies 30% of the screen, regardless of the width of the screen. Thus, the page is completely filled with the displayed screen. The advantage of responsive design over adaptive design is that it is more flexible. This design is one of the sources of SEO optimization that is strongly promoted by Google.
Sometimes choosing a design for your computer or even creating a mobile website seems quite easy, but the process is not easy at all. By applying an adaptive design, the workload is increased several times, and the process is repeated twice or more. In this case, the most successful thing is to index a single website to a responsive design that gives us connectivity and visibility from any device.
In the absence of a responsive web design, the first noticeable effect is errors or the situation when the device does not support certain images. This is because each device has different screens, processors, operating systems and memory. By choosing a responsive design, it is possible to solve all problems from a single HTML and CSS.
Why does Google support responsive design?
Today, Google strikes a perfect balance between efficiency and quality, and having a responsive design wins two things. On the one hand, it offers places in search engines that care about providing maximum comfort to its users, on the other hand, it has to index only one place.
Google recommends a responsive design based on the benefits it brings to SEO:
- Simplifies work and reduces workload.
- More usage, access to the same content from any device, so there is no annoying redirection.
- No duplication of content is allowed.
- SEO should no longer analyze all versions that share the same URLs, just one website and one analysis is enough.
So which design is better for you in general?
The answer to this question depends on what your site and your customers want. If your main concern is that your site works independently of the device, responsive design is more suitable for creating a standard site. If you have a mobile audience with very special needs, then it may be more appropriate to implement an adaptive design.
