Responsive Web Design – Challenges and Scope for Future

The year 2013 has been dubbed as 'The Year of Responsive Web'. The technology, though still in its nascent form, has taken the world by storm, and is catalyzing a major change change in the way people access information, even as we speak. With the numbers of hand held devices being sold increasing every year (Tablet sales are expected to exceed 100 million this year – Mashable.com), website owners are keener than ever to have websites that will provide a good user experience across all platforms. While the technology might still seem formidable to some due to the fact that it is new and still evolving, it certainly is the way forward for those looking to stay on top.

As the name suggests, Responsive Web Design is the design approach for building websites where-in the code would recognize the device accessing the website and scale the components according to it. For example, the contents and images that are used to load a website on the desktop would get scaled down when the website is viewed from a smart phone. The major advantages of RWD are:

Same code base to load on all platforms.

This makes development simpler and changes easier to incorporate, for otherwise, writing separate codes for each platform would make the code base humongous and difficult to maintain

Better SEO Benefits

When you load the same website with the same URL linking to the same HTML, with only the CSS changing for each device, you derive better SEO results. The same URL will show up on Google searches on all platforms. If there were more than one URLs for different platforms, it might confuse and irk the users since they might end up clicking on the URL meant for a smart phone, on a desktop device. In fact, even Google, the mother of all search engines recommends RWD for websites for a better Google ranking.

However, the one-size-fits-all solution is not always perfect and not without limitations. Some of the major challenges that developers and users alike face with RWD are -

Performance and Speed

Since mobile internet is almost always not as fast as a wired connection, the website loading times on hand held devices might continue to be lower. This is also accentuated by the fact that the a large amount of code still needs to be sent to the device before the application can recognize it and use the code required for that device alone. These factors can greatly bring down the loading speed and thus not give as good a user experience and RWD is supposed to give.

Complexity

Embracing RWD as an approach can be quite a complex process if not handled with diligent planning and some creative designing. Web developers and business owners need to be very clear about what they want the users to see on their websites, when viewed through a desktop or a tablet or a smart phone. Some features that look great on desktop might not work on other devices, and the design should be carried out in such a way that the website looks and feels great on every platform. All this can greatly increase the complexity of creating a responsive website.

The Future

While RWD has entered with a bang and made a comfortable place for itself amongst the most happening technologies of the day, for it to grow further, efforts need to be made to make it more easy and light. One step in that direction is the emergence of RESS, which is defined as a “responsive website with server side detection.” In simple words, with this technique, detection and recognition of the device making a call to the website is transferred to the server side, instead of the client side. The server finds out whether it is a tablet or a PC requesting the website, and send only the code pertaining to that platform to the client. Therefore, the code traveling to the device is largely reduced, and so is the time spent by the device in loading it. And so, better performance and more simplicity!

Resources
http://www.bluetrainmobile.com/blog/the-next-generation-of-responsive-web-design-ress/#.UpQ06NTtmGU
http://inspiredm.com/creating-the-future-of-mobile-responsive-web-design/ http://www.technologybell.com/what-is-role-of-responsive-web-design-in-mobile-seo-strategy/ http://mashable.com/2012/12/11/responsive-web-design/

Posted in: Branding,HTML5,Responsive,SEO,Web