Mobile Application or Responsive Website: What Is Best for Your Business?

With the advancement of mobile technology, it has become a matter of continuous liability to all business owners. They spend hours and hours discussing what should be best for their company, whether to develop a separate mobile application or to transform them existing website into a responsive one in order to generate more traffic. The solution, for most of the time, is ambiguous. However, if you think with your mind and not with your intelligence (the difference is negligible though), firstly you have to decide why you actually want to optimize your website design. The following points will clearly chalk out the reasons behind your decision:

To keep your business updated: When you are running a profitable business, it becomes important for you to keep track of all the latest trends and updates in technology. Creating mobile optimized websites is the latest technology in the industry which is getting positive response from all over the world.

• To enhance user experience: With advancing technology and high speed internet, users are becoming more and more impatient towards slow loading pages and continuing clicking and zooming. They tend to drift away in seconds which increases bounce rates and affects your website ranking adversely. Moreover, the mobile industry surveys have revealed that the 10-11% percentage of mobile web users in or around 2010-11 have covered 30% of global internet users today. Here, in order to achieve high quality user experience, you need to make your website accessible from all devices.

Mostly, these are the two main reasons for which all companies are hell bound in hiring expert website designers, thoroughly updated with the knowledge of new design approaches.

Now, coming to the main part, how will you decide what will enhance user experience more? What will decrease bounce rates, an exclusively designed mobile application or a simpler, cost effective solution of creating a responsive website which can be viewed from all devices?

The answer is dependent solely on the type of business you want to do with your website; Whether you want to sell products, provide content or give information about your services and products.
Mobile applications:

For e-commerce websites, it is highly recommended to develop separate mobile applications for your website. A responsive design, though it is both cost and time effective, fails to trigger buying interest in the minds of customers. For that, you need to provide an exclusive and high quality user experience. Moreover, responsive websites generally prefer top to bottom scrolling while mobile users are likely to scroll from left to right while viewing products and prices which is provided by mobile applications. Not only that, but mobile apps are also designed carefully so as to support easy transactions and online shopping becomes delightful. On the other hand, an all-device responsive website will fail to meet the expectations of maximum users under these sections.

The advantages of mobile applications over responsive website designs for e-commerce sites are summarized below:

• Exclusive and enhanced user experience,
• Side scrolling,
• No chance of missing important content,
• Online payment made easier,
• Smooth transactions,
• Saves time and requires minimum effort.

Responsive websites:

In other words, to make your website responsive is actually an attempt to increase traffic and potential customers, irrespective of the devices they are using to view your website. In a responsive design, a single code is required to develop the website and a single link or URL is used to view it from all devices. This significantly cuts down the expenses of creating an exclusive application for mobile web users. However, as said earlier, responsive websites do have some limitations like page loading problems, chances of missing important content in a hurry and payment difficulties. Here, they are generally not applicable for e-commerce sites.

Neverheless, a responsive website is held in high esteem by the search engines, especially Google. Therefore, if a website is responsive, it has the tendency to rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) than its non-responsive counterparts. Moreover, responsive websites follow a grid pattern of layout and adjust themselves with increasing or decreasing skin resolutions which enhances user experience when they view it from their relevant tablets, phabloids and iPads. It is best applicable for content related sites, corporate or business websites, blogs and other informational sites. A responsive design is critical for business websites as they have the same impression to create from all kinds of devices which is a little altered with separate web applications.

The most significant advantages of responsive website designs are jotted below:

• Cost effectiveness,
• Easy to update information,
• Single URL-based website,
• Simple and enhanced appearance, irrespective of the device used,
• One single code is used to develop the website,
• Adjustments to all screen sizes and resolutions,
• Provides a significant cut down in maintenance costs,
• Changes need not be made for the different versions of a single website.
• Users are able to view the website effectively from all mobile devices without confusion.

Here, you can see that both technologies are highly effective in taking your business to the next level. However, it is always better to seek professional advice while taking such important decisions regarding your business.