Anyone who embraces responsive webdesign is stupid

Granted it’s harder to take an existing site and backward engineer it for mobile rather than starting with a clean slate but if you build a separate site for mobile then you have the extra headache of 2 sites and all that content to manage.

I feel it would be better to redesign the current one so that it works across devices from the start and in the process make it a better experience for all devices.

As Bruce Lawson said a while ago the question is "whether there is such a thing as a mobile web or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices?

Where does the mobile web start and where does it end and how do you detect them? We have devices ranging in size from small phones, large phones, tablets of multiple sizes, laptops, desktops etc. Users typically access the web on various devices depending where they are it seems that the consensus of opinion is that visitors should experience more or less the same thing but in a way that suits the platform.

We should build desktop sites that are fast and easy to use from the start and then converting them to mobile (or vice versa) isn’t so much of a problem.

Apps are a separate concern as an app usually does one thing and does that one thing well but does not really relate to the web as a whole.

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The content wouldn’t change. The mobile site would simply display it differently. Nothing extra to manage as far as the backend or server-side stuff. It’s not like you have to write two completely different articles or something.

Mobile devices still detect mobile sites when they exist. And the user has the option to show the full desktop site or not. This never bothered me. Sometimes I wanted their mobile version, but if they chopped out way too much info, I’d switch to the desktop version and pinch/zoon my way through the content.

Sure. Well the “mobile first” design concept is still relatively new. I agree with it for most sites but I also think some content-heavy or multimedia-heavy sites might still suffer when trying to “grow up” a mobile-first design into a nice desktop experience.

Like others have said; on a desktop, I have lots and lots of room. I don’t want to see a full-screen calculator. I don’t want to see humongous wasted space and requiring me to perform many extra unneeded steps opening menus and hidden slideouts and such because the mobile experience is showing its ugly head on my desktop.

Like you said, visitors should have an experience that suits the platform. For me that means on a desktop I see more information at once, with less scrolling, clicking, opening, sliding, and playing hide and seek with information. But on a mobile, I want the meat front and center and ready to consume with all the fluff hidden away.

I think we will just have to agree to disagree and who knows I may be completely wrong but from the hundred or so small sites I’ve done for clients this year I have never had a problem making them responsive or usable.

Sounds like a responsive site to me.:slight_smile:

I don’t believe you can use the same ‘back end’ with a different structure without a lot of problems; which is what we are trying to avoid.

That’s the problem. You cant reliably test for mobile devices as mentioned in that article I linked to and even when you try you are back in the realms of ‘browser sniffing’ which everyone agreed never works in the noughties so why are we trying to do the same again?

You also have the added problem of what is a mobile device as they are not just small phones. You can have large phones or small tablets that are mobile devices and would need responsive sites also as a one size fits all approach doesn’t even work for just the mobile sector.

It’s really just one web which we access with various devices and a well thought out responsive site can meet those needs. Most of the .mob sites I’ve visited have been cut down versions of the main site and miss out all the content that I was visiting for. Users don’t want less content on a mobile they still want it all.

There are bad designs and there are good designs and as mentioned in that article sites that have gone lean, mean and responsive have outperformed their previous incarnations considerably. You can have your large calculator on the desktop and hide it for small screen without too much trouble; assuming that you planned for it that way.

There are certain problems to overcome of course but I don’t believe a separate mobile site is the way forward for most people. There are cases where companies have unlimited resources and perhaps a mobile only site will work for them but for the majority of sites responsive is a good option.

It would be good to hear other peoples views as things are never always black and white in web design :slight_smile:

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What do you mean by that?

Which bit?

I was summarising from the article link I posted earlier and basically it has been shown that slimming your desktop version down produces better visitor satisfaction. The same goals that you want for the mobile version apply just the same to the desktop and keeping things lightweight, straight forward and simple will usually pay dividends.

People tend to think that as they are coding for desktops they can throw everything including the kitchen sink into the project when instead they should be producing a fast, lean and efficient site without all the extra cruft. When you start from that viewpoint then mobile and desktop become easier to manage in a responsive site.

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The sad part is that what is usually meant by “slimming” is just getting rid of banners, ads, useless graphics and other nonsense screen elements.

After all, people are in the business of consuming content. When I visit a site, I’m there to read something, watch something, or listen to something, not casually browse sidebars, popups, flyouts, mega menus, and look at a dozens sponsored ad placements.

Lean, to me, means gimme the content, pure and simple.

I agree most websites can be responsive and work just fine. My argument is that some websites, especially content-rich sites like magazines/news, simply do not trim down responsively very well. A large complicated site, no matter how hard you try, will only end up looking chopped up and ugly with responsive design. The only way to fix an inherently “large” website to be useable on mobile is to have an optimized mobile design. This is why complex sites like news and magazines all want to have apps to consume their content. An app is, after all, just an optimized mobile experience.

Responsive design is already doing the same thing again. Don’t you have to pick precise pixels when your design will shift its look? Aren’t there such things as scale factors and high density screens? Saying that we shouldn’t “detect” the device is really no different than saying we shouldn’t “detect” sub 700 pixel widths. What’s the difference? It’s still the designer who is deciding at what point his design will benefit from a shift in layout.

I’m all for responsive design, so don’t get me wrong, there are much needed techniques there. But that also doesn’t make me feel good to see a content-rich site “responsive-designed” down to a shrunken mess. I suppose that is still just the fault of the designer. Designers also create crappy .mob sites.

All I’m saying is that sometimes I’d like to experience a highly optimized desktop site, and sometimes a highly optimized mobile site. And responsive web design alone can’t accomplish it. At least not without some tradeoffs, like additional scripts and styles, which actually makes the mobile site more bloated than the desktop site!

Back on the original question, I saw this earlier. It looks like there are an awful lot of stupid people out there, and the situation is getting worse…

No its not really the same as they use different methodologies. ‘Browser sniffing’ is checking the User Agent string and trying to find out if the devices you want to target are in there. Of course in the last couple of years the devices you would be testing for have changed or indeed many new ones are on the scene and won’t get picked up by your script. Browser sniffing is unreliable at best and a short-sighted approach.

Responsive design on the other hand is mainly only interested in the width (or height) available in which to show your design. You can serve retina quality images for higher quality devices if you want but that’s all catered for in the css at no extra cost and is a side issue to the main question. There is no browser sniffing in responsive design and indeed the best approach is to be device agnostic,

Even if you find there is a real need for .mob version of your website then you still have to create a responsive site to take care of all the tablets, ipads, mini ipads, small laptops and loads of other various sized devices.

Not to mention that google’s algorithm now prefers responsive websites and will return higher results for responsive sites than for non responsive.

Google also recommends responsive web design instead of mobile only sites.

Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern.

This would seem to confirm what I have been saying and that RWD is still the way forward.

There may be some use cases for mobile only sites but for the majority RWD is the best choice. We shouldn’t also try to mimic an 'app; with our mobile view; an app is usually a specialised application that does one thing really well whereas a website has do do many things.

We seem to be talking the same language here :smile: (but perhaps looking at it from a different point of view).

I’ll add that a feature that’s important to me personally is to be able to browse a desktop version of a site even if I’m on a small screen such as a phone. Sometimes when we optimize for small screens, we’re forced to cut too much, and the mobile site ends up feeling like a crippled version of its desktop counterpart. This is especially true for sites that have high density content and features, such as Amazon or IMDb, for example, where I almost always choose to browse the full, desktop version, even if I’m on my phone.

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Well like I’ve been saying, it’s only really complicated, content-heavy sites with a rich desktop experience which suffer when retrofitting mobile-responsive design.

Take Facebook for example, that’s a 4-column design. It has a couple simple responsive changes but bottoms out at 1000px, hardly mobile size.
Sure they want you to use the mobile app, but I don’t. I just use it within Chrome, and guess what, they present an optimized mobile site, not some crunchy munchy responsive magic on the 4-column desktop design.

If somebody can turn the 4-column desktop Facebook into the single column mobile experience with some magic responsive CSS and honey-I-shrunk-zuckerberg magic JS, then I’d like to see them try.
They would be, in effect, trying to recreate and redesign the entire website purely with CSS/JS, when in fact the mobile FB experience requires its own set of features and functionality to be a good experience. Heck, just optimizing for mouse versus finger navigation is often a big deal. It isn’t just, make DIVs bigger with media queries.

Google may want responsive, but Facebook ain’t listening, they know a good mobile experience needs to be designed from the top down as a mobile experience, while the desktop experience needs to be designed as a desktop experience, with all those 4 glorious columns. (except the 4th one).

I think that may be the crux. Facebook was already designed. Redesigning it would take a lot of time and effort (read $$$) to do it right. So for them it is a more economical decision to write a separate mobile version.
But that isn’t a reason to have a separate mobile version if you’re starting from scratch anyway.

Was that all? I’d be curious to know their actual thinking on the issue. Plus the fact that you basically just said, in effect, “it’s cheaper doing dedicated mobile sites, and easier, and more economical.”

Yes, in part, but you left off the “than it is to rewrite a comlipcated site that is already written”

Tell that to the people I have been trying to sell my services to.

One girl from the custom coding dept of my own web host (unknowingly) called the latest site I built “outdated”.

People love tons of images and bling and general shit in their websites or it won’t sell… :angry:

We can only advise people from our professioanl standpoint.

If they want marquee text and blinking images, against my wishes, who am I to stop them? I’m getting paid for it.

Make your recommendations, point out you’re the professional (you know the industry), and if they don’t want to listen, they won’t listen.

Yeah, but my point was that I spent a lot of time developing my website - and then I stole some of my design for my client’s website - and I was quite proud of what I did. Then I tried to find other clients, and quickly I surmised that your average person doesn’t appreciate my simple design.

They think I am a bad developer (and designer) because it doesn’t look like some picturesque WordPress template.

If only most people felt this way… :disappointed:

“He who pays the piper…” :slight_smile:

I think Facebook are big enough not to have to pander to Google’s recommendations. They have the fame, user base and serps regardless. Plus they have their app for mobile users. But its not the same for every site.
I think the difference in opinion comes from the difference in the sites we have in mind, you are specifically taking about very big, complex sites, the likes of which I have not worked on.

I think that it’s absurd for everyone on either side of this issue to be comparing a site like Amazon or Facebook to sites that might be made for a local, regional, or heck, even a large international business (like many people’s clients or employers here). Not saying there aren’t applicable principles, but remember that once you’re in that market of billions, the rules, at least somewhat, are different. People would still go to those places even if they hate the design - in sum. Of course some wouldn’t (and don’t) but that’s not stopping the juggernaut.

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