Should I go with a Mobile Site or Responsive Design

[TodorF.]

So I work with a Video Editing Plugin company and we have hit a bit of a conundrum with our mobile site plan.  At first we were going to a stripped down version of our current site since the customer base has yet to purchase off mobile and almost all of the web traffic comes from a full computer. ( As video editing on tablets still leaves a bit to be desired). I was thinking a mobile site, but at the same point, I don't want to have issues when it comes to URLs and what not.

Given that a majority of our traffic is non mobile. Would it be better to design a separate stripped down mobile site, or would responsive still be the better choice?  Are mobile specific sites becoming old fashion?

[MonicaOConnor]

I agree with Anthony. It is important to offer the same experience to desktop and mobile users. A responsive design, in my opinion, is much easier to manage and offers the best user experience. Google has said that they do not have a preference for one version over the other, the important thing is to have a mobile friendly version of your site. I think most professionals would recommend a responsive design unless having a responsive design creates a user experience that would be better if there were simply a mobile version of the site. I think that is the only exception.

[Alex-Harford]

I would go with responsive. From experience, a separate mobile site might be easier to setup in the short-term but will cause more issues in the long-term (I haven't ever worked on anything like a video editing website, but I would imagine it wouldn't create many other issues).

Have you looked into why no one has purchased from a mobile device? I've seen conversion issues on mobile that don't impact the desktop version of websites - sometimes checkouts that don't work at all on mobile. But as you said, most of the traffic comes from desktop browsers so it could just be that.

Although separate mobile sites will still benefit from Google's mobile update (if they're mobile friendly), Google do recommend responsive over a separate site e.g. here in their starter guide: "Google recommends using RWD over other design patterns." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/

There's also a useful white paper from Google here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_uk/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-consumer-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf

[TheWebMastercom]

Google recommends responsive design - see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/recommendations-for-building-smartphone.html

[abiondo]

Hi Josh

This may be a more subjective question, but my vote is for responsive.  Even though you don't have a high volume of traffic today that is mobile, it will most likely increase and when you have a mobile-friendly page it will most likely accelerate. Some companies still go with stripped down mobile sites, but I have been seeing more people moving towards responsive to minimize the need of managing two separate sites and being able to give their mobile users as much content and functionality as possible.

Also on April 21st Google is going to start giving more preference to mobile sites.  You can read more about it in the Moz article - http://moz.com/blog/9-things-about-googles-mobile-friendly-update

Hope this helps,
Anthony B
Biondo Creative
biondocreative.com