Making Sites Work on Mobile - Alternative to Responsive Design

radderfire · 13 Oct 2014 at 15:45

Hi Chaps

Obviously I'm aware of responsive design, but how difficult is the alternative of building a dedicated mobile site?

How does a dedicated mobile site work? Do you just use some simple code to detect a mobile visitor and then serve the dedicated mobile site?

Thanks

Russinating · 13 Oct 2014 at 16:51

It's not good practice because content is duplicated. There's a reason why responsive is king!

radderfire · 13 Oct 2014 at 17:07

Thanks for the reply. Just deciding which solution is best.

nolimit · 14 Oct 2014 at 20:29

Agree with Russinating.

We made the descision to create seperate solutions for desktop and mobile in 2012 for 2 big websites, and now it is such a pain to manage them both, and we are in the process of making it responsive, but again with existing code base it is such a pain.

GravyMonster · 15 Oct 2014 at 07:42

Another +1 for responsive.

Splitting the code base just leads to a maintenance nightmare. What could be easier than adding another stylesheet?

Goody_GTI · 15 Oct 2014 at 12:21

Another +1 for responsive, and from experience start with mobile first and then add features when more screen space is available.

touch · 15 Oct 2014 at 14:10

You're going to have to make it responsive anyway - it's expected of websites now.
You'll have a huge range of screen sizes viewing your desktop size so you'll need a responsive design to handle that.
For example, if you draw the line at 8" tablets and decide anything below that will go to the mobile site, that still means you have to cater for everything from 10inch tablets to 30+inch desktop monitors on the main site.
If you're making a responsive site anyway, it would be easier just to have it cover all possible screen sizes right down to small smartphones.

Varsh · 15 Oct 2014 at 16:24

Another +1 for responsive.

Once you have the rough idea on how your site looks like you just simply need to think of how it would go from full width to mobile width. Having things like 4 columns can easily be stacked on top of each other for instance. It's a great way to force yourself into optimising your layouts too.

Tripnologist · 17 Oct 2014 at 22:42

Go responsive AND adaptive.

melvis · 18 Oct 2014 at 06:34

I have some old legacy rubbish that had a seperate site under m.domainname, and was forwarded based on useragent or displaywidth to the m. when people visited the www.

but i agree with everyone else, dont do what I did

JimAroo · 19 Oct 2014 at 21:23

Responsive design has its advantages and disadvantages.

I'm all for Responsive design where possible but sometimes it just doesn't work out. We've occasionally had to go the cookie route where you detect the device and set a cookie, that way when you render your views you simply check for the set cookie.

PHP:

....

if (isset($_COOKIE['cookie']))
{
    $this->render('mobile_view');
}
else
{
    $this->render('desktop_view');
}