I have an ongoing project recently, which is a website for the most popular dating TV show in China. The show is held overseas occasionally. Last time it came to New Zealand was five years ago. All the candidates who is willing to participate have a very long application form to fill, and the basic PSD design for this website from our designer is based on computer screen size.
Since the website is a temporary project, we won’t spend too much efforts on it. However, the application page is hard for mobile users to fill. Then we had a discussion on improving it by responsive or adaptive way.
Our company’s website Skykiwi is using adaptive design. The main reason is the main revenue of Skykiwi comes from advertising. Different-size ads charge different fixed rates. Normally the designers will work out the design based on the size. If the web pages are scrollable, the design work would also be tough - they may need to design serveral sizes for even one ad.
Therefore, Skykiwi takes adaptive design. developers build two versions of codes. The web server will detect the device, and then the brower will load different address based on computer devices or mobile phones.
Most of the big websites are built with adaptive design. This can be easily found from the address when you open it in your mobile devices’ browsers. If the address is like starting with m.taobao.com or containing wap, then it surely has at least two sets of codes for different visited devices.
