Determine the Difference of Adaptive and Responsive Website Design Solutions

Web development could include anything from programming website, adding work portfolio to client's project content, network security and a lot more.

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It goes without saying that the better a website appears, the more visitors would be drawn to it, and so it’s worthwhile to focus on the design aspects and coding. This is where a web development company comes to play.

Choosing a web development company

There is a myriad of choices when it comes to website design and development. A web design company could provide exclusive customized web solutions across all open source technologies, such as for instance PHP, Drupal, Magento, WordPress, PrestaShop, and a whole lot more. Hiring a web design development company is one of the biggest decisions a business or organization has to make.
It lays down the groundwork as well as sets the tone of the website since it is what people would associate the business with. Here are some several things to look out for when deciding to collaborate with a service provider:

• It’s critical to look carefully at the company that would make the website before making a commitment.
• A good web development company would offer choices of ongoing support, platform, the ability of purchasing additional maintenance and initial training in the CMS of the website.

Often, one could tell if the service provider is a good fit by checking out the portfolio and seeing how many happy clients they have.

Adaptive or responsive web design

Dealing with a tectonic shift in user behavior? The world of website development has shifted, far beyond the m-dot or t-dot hacks era, towards a responsive and adaptive design techniques rule, what is called the W3C calls as a One Web approach. The major part of the W3C’s recommendation is that the ‘One Web’ means making as reasonable, the same info and services available to users, regardless of the device that they are using.
For a web design company or a developer, this means taking a One Web approach that ensures that not only does the website work on smartphones and tablets at present, but could also be future-proofed for the unimagined screens of the future. Currently, there are three popular approaches to a One Web site development, and that’s using responsive design, client-side adaptive designs as well as server-side adaptive designs. It’s not right to say that one is better or worse than the other, since each has its own strengths as well as weaknesses, and a wise web design development company would take into consideration the benefits and drawbacks of each before choosing the one that works best for the project.

What is responsive web design?

The most common One Web approach is responsive web design. The approach makes use of CSS media queries in modifying the presentation of a website, based on the size of the display of the device. The number of responsive websites are growing fast. The major advantage of this approach is that the designers of a web design company could use only one template for all devices, and just utilize CSS to be able to determine how content is rendered on various screen sizes.
Moreover, the designers could still work on CSS and HTML, technologies that they already familiar with. In addition, there is a growing number of open-source, responsive-friendly toolkits, such as Foundation or Bootstrap that help simplify the process of creating responsive websites. The design and testing phase could be a little complicated since it could be hard to customize the user experience for each possible device/context.
There are responsive website layouts, which look like a bunch of pieces of a puzzle that do not quite fit together. A web design that’s responsive works best when combined with a mobile-first approach, wherein a mobile use case is a priority during development. Progressive improvement then is used in addressing desktop and tablet use instances.
Although responsive design is quickly becoming a de facto standard, it creates new challenges as well for online businesses, such as optimizing mobile performance, how to handle images and this often means that websites should be rebuilt from the ground up with an approach that is mobile first.

What is client-side adaptive development?

Adaptive design builds on responsive design principles to be able to deliver use experiences, which are targeted at certain contexts and devices. It makes use of JavaScript to enrich sites with improved customization and functionality. For instance, adaptive websites deliver images that have Retina-quality to Retina displays only, like the new iPad while standard-definition displays will receive lower-quality images.
There are a couple of adaptive design approaches, one in which adaptations happen on the client side, on the browser of the user, and another wherein a web server does the heavy lifting of detecting different deices, as well as loading the correct template. Examples of client-side adaptive websites are Ideeli and Threadless. An adaptive templating approach has one particular strength, which is the ability of reusing one JavaScript and HTML set across devices, which simplifies change management and testing.
A client-side adaptive approach means no need to rebuild the website from the bottom up. Rather, a designer or developer of a web design development company could build on existing content while still delivering a layout that is mobile-responsive. For expert developers, the approach enables targeting particular devices specifically, or screen resolutions.
Unlike a responsive website design, adaptive templates make certain that only the required resources are loaded by the device of the client. CDN networks, like Edgecast and Akamai could make use of most of the caching functionality without disrupting the user experience since device and feature detection is moved towards the mobile device itself. A client-side adaptive approach has higher barrier compared to a responsive design.
Developers should have a robust grasp of JavaScript in order to use this technique. Also, it depends on the existing templates of a website as the foundation. Finally, since client-side adaptations are a type of layer of the existing code base, they should be maintained as the website evolves.
Why a web development company should choose server-side adaptive? A Server-side adaptive approach usually offers distinguished templates for each and every device, with more customization allowed, and keeping the device-detection logic on a server, letting smaller mobile pages faster loading. Furthermore, there are several server-side plug-ins available for common e-commerce and CMS systems, like Magento.
Choosing between responsive and adaptive website design will depend on the specific requirements of an organization. A web development service provider should be able to ascertain the specific requirements to make the right choice, whether responsive or adaptive.