With the explosion of smartphone popularity it's more important than ever to have a mobile friendly website for your business.

There are two main strategies for transferring your non-responsive website into a responsive one.

• You can create an all-new responsive website, or;
• You can keep the website you have now and have a separate mobile specific website built.

A responsive website uses the latest presentation technologies to display your website in a format that can be viewed on your desktop screen and all the way down to your smartphone whilst maintaining the same style and theme. The advantage of this technique is that it means that you only have to maintain one website. If you have to make a change, however, you must think about how the change will be displayed on both desktop and mobile displays - this may add to the time and cost of your project, particularly if your website has a lot of custom functionality.

A separate mobile-friendly site is a website designed specifically for mobile devices. These types of websites can be rather quick to develop and deploy to the web; an excellent idea if you already have a website but need a mobile site as well. The disadvantage to this, however, is that this mobile site is an independent website. Changes made to the main website may not be reflected on the mobile website unless they are set up to share content and the mobile website will require its own maintenance, meaning you are maintaining two websites instead of one.

If your website is basic and does not contain a lot of built-in custom functionality, your best bet would be to opt for a new website. You can give your business image a face lift with a new design while ensuring all your customers, whether they use desktop or mobile phone, will easily be able to access and use your page.

On the other hand, a good example of a brand that had too much custom functionality on their page to consider recreating it, is Facebook. When they opted to move to mobile responsivity, they left facebook.com unaffected while creating a whole new mobile site m.facebook.com for visitors using their phone.

We have worked on a similar project for our client,  Cavalletti. We have a case study on how we deployed a separate mobile-friendly website for their customers to browse on the mobile devices.

There are a lot of different avenues when considering how to adapt to mobile responsivity and not all will be right for your business. AB Web Developers prides themselves in offering superior customer service, so schedule a meeting, build your questions list up and come and let us help to guide you through the minefield of mobile web development.