The world is shifting into new orbits with the advancement of the technology and this transformation is towards mobile-first strategy.

Well, it doesn’t eliminate the desktop development, but the businesses are certainly leaning towards responsive applications. It means more mobile usage for browsing distinct websites.

According to E-Marketer, “Nearly 2.6 billion people over 1/3 of consumers worldwide will use Smart phones by 2018.”

So, Mobile Responsive Website = High ROI.

This is a story of mobile influence over the diverse industries.

For an average Joe, the ability to browse the website on the mobile device is a great experience. What they all need is the website is mobile-friendly. They never think about whether the website is responsive or mobile first developed.

But, to an entrepreneur, the scenario is different. They prefer to develop a responsive website that creates mobile-first experiences. The two designs are so intertwined that muddies the water. Actually, both responsive design and mobile-first design cannot be alternative of another, while they are different.

Let’s clear up the air:

Responsive website design is actually one size fits all solution where the website design appears similar on every device in terms of look and feel. On the other hand, mobile-first website design is a device-specific approach that mainly focuses on how the website looks on the mobile screens.

A long debate is going over the widespread issue to determine which will help businesses to stand out in the market. Here, we have outlined certain factors based on the research that will help you know what will stay in fashion in 2017. They are:

(1) Optimize for User experience

The responsive design can be fit well with any screen size, resolution and mode, be it a 20’ of monitor, 15’ of laptop or 4’ of the smart phone. This all is possible with a single code base that’s awesome. But, displaying the same content across all the devices impact user experience. See how.

“Nearly 8 in 10 of consumers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device,” according to Adobe.

On the Desktop screen showcasing a lot of content at once is readable, but not on the smaller screens. It matters to the target audience. When the content is also optimized for good user experience, responsive design incurs extra time and efforts.  

Instead, the mobile-first are already designed keeping mobile users in mind where limited content is displayed on the screen at once that’s perfectly readable by the users.

(2) Possible navigation

The responsive web design services are considered as appropriate for corporate website, media website, blog website, news based website or location based services where users generally prefer to scroll top to down on every device.

Instead, the responsive web design is not a cup of tea for retail or entertainment websites, as the users prefer to scroll from left to right in place of top to bottom. However, it’s possible in responsive design with customization, but that again it calls for more efforts.

With mobile-first design, both types of navigation are enabled either you want to incorporate left to bottom or top to bottom.

(3) Google is also judging

The web surfer may give the responsive design or mobile-first design an afterthought, but not the Google-like search engines. Well, the search engines also never get biased with responsive design or mobile-first design and never deduct ranking points considering this criterion.

Instead, the user experience that responsive designs or mobile-first design offer matters to the search engines and based on them the websites are ranked.

(4) Development cycle-which takes a long time?

The website development has become obsolete while it’s the trend of responsive website design or mobile-first design. Developing the website according to latest fashion require more time and efforts. However, when we are going to compare the two, the responsive design engineering wins.

Yes, although it’s a famous notion for the responsive design that with one codebase the website optimized for all devices can be built, but this is the half truth. When the complex menus, left to right navigation, or content optimization is implemented the responsive design development time gets elongated and takes more time as opposed to mobile-first design development.

(5) Design complexity goes up

As already discussed the responsive designs that appear simple to design may demands a little more effort if the website design is complex. But, it’s feasible to make things done.

For mobile-first design development, the trained professionals are needed who are well-versed in the underlying technologies like- HTML5, Sencha, jQuery, JavaScript, CSS and other, that’s difficult to find out. Moreover, the app features versatility and complexity gets increased for touch-enabled devices.

The verdict

Engineering the responsive design or mobile-first design is like a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Picking up the one is not fair because the existence of one in the absence of another is not feasible. Going responsive lets you design the website boundlessly and bring your ideas into reality while jumping onto mobile-first design initially won’t let your developers waste efforts in the area which is not required.

Both website design trends have their own pros and cons. It’s good to check the things you need and then refine down. Later, at the point of intersection, decide what you actually need of.

What are you going to hire responsive web design services or mobile-first design services? Decide and go ahead with what you want to approach.

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