Hi everybody. Today, let's talk about some of the benefits of responsive design. First thing we need to realize is that responsive design means different things to different people. We're going to talk about three different options that people often use, and why the responsive web design that we're going to adopt has its true benefits. The first option, responsive web design or RWD, is really dealing with fluid measurements, flexible grids, and varying CSS rules. We also have adaptive design, or what's sometimes called dynamic serving. What happens here is that you can end up returning different versions of a page based on the type of device being used. The third type is the separate mobile site, or .m. This is when you create a completely separate page URL for the mobile site. First, let's talk about responsive web design. With the definition that we're using, the test really is, are you getting back the same code regardless of the device that you're using? You know that I'm a big fan of inspect element and viewing the source code, so my question is, are you going to get the same source code no matter what platform you're looking at? Now, as humans we can do that by viewing the source code or other little tricks. But sometimes when you're thinking about things such as source engine optimization and getting really high rankings on your page. A bot can also tell if you're using responsive web design by looking for certain meta tag named viewport. It can be detected automatically and would really, kind of help boost your search engine score, is what many people think. The second type, adaptive design, means that the server figures out what kind of device you're running on and then returns specific HTML and CSS for that page. So you can get completely different code depending upon what device you're using. With responsive web design, it's the same code, just different styling. Here, you're getting different content, the important thing you realize is that no matter where you're doing it from, you're using the same URL. Now, there's a few issues with this, in that the server might return the wrong code if the wrong device type is detected. That third option of having a dedicated mobile site, or a .m URL, means that you're going to get a different page completely on a completely different URL when you're using this approach. it's incredibly popular and you're going to see it very often. When you're on a site, check and see if you have .m in front of your normal URL, or sometimes even a little bit different URL depending upon your device. It's possible if you're going to take this design step to link the fact that pages are related by including a link tag and using the relationships canonical and alternate. Which means, you know what? This is my main page but I do have some alternate URLs out there. Why would you bother doing this? Again it's for search engine optimization. It really helps if the search engines can know that this is the same type of information just on different URLs. So why am I stressing responsive web design? Well, number one, it's a lot easier to share your data if you only have a single URL. You don't want to have to have multiple versions to hand out to people if they want to access your site. It's also easier for search engines such as Google to index the page or kind of mark it to know that it seen it before and would like to rank it. The number one reason, again, is that fewer files means less maintenance. If you have different HTML code for different platforms, if you change one, that's not maintaining all of them. You have to go in and update every single file. And another reason, is that if you have a single place that you're going a single URL, then you're going to have less redirection. Redirection is when you go to a site, and you see that the URL is being changed as the server tries to figure out what type of device you're using and what kind of page or URL you should be redirected to. Lower load time is always great. Hopefully you see why responsive design is really important. It may even be obvious to you because you're really into this topic. However, if you're ever working a project, you may need to convince someone that they need to pay you for that extra time to make sure their site is responsive. And in that case, hopefully, you've learned some facts here that can help convince other people how important responsive web design really is.
