We get asked many times whether to go with a Mobile design or Responsive design. The simple answer is: “It depends.”
When to go with a Mobile design for your eCommerce store.
We find it’s most economical to go with a mobile design for your eCommerce store when you already have an established store and aren’t currently wanting to upgrade or redo the look of the store. With our Mobile Module for X-cart we can customize the look to match your current current X-cart store.
When to go with a Responsive design for your eCommerce store.
We find it’s most economical to go with a responsive design for your eCommerce store when you are wanting to redo the look and feel and/or are upgrading your website. This makes it the easiest and most efficient way to get a responsive design by coding the template to be responsive from the start. It can be very inefficient to translate an existing code and CSS set into a responsive framework. So this is best done when you are already creating a new fresh look. We feel currently that responsive is the way to go in general because you then have only one set of files, css, etc to change if you want to change some items on your site. But it’s best to switch to responsive when creating a new look or upgrading.
Check out our new Magento Store which gives you a sneak peek at the new design coming to BCSE as well as our work making a responsive template!
What about SEO, is Mobile or Responsive better?
It really just depends on doing the one you pick well! If either is done well, then it will work well for SEO. Google for example recognizes both types of mobile design solutions. There is even a recent article about Google’s Matt Cutts answering these questions. You can read the full article here.
