Responsive vs Non responsive website

I'm going to agree with your expert. A website needs to be optimized for the mobile experience. Having a mobile site, whether you have a completely different mobile site or using a responsive theme is extremely important for your business. Not only is it much better for SEO, it can increase your conversions. 2014 is the year where mobile completely takes over and if you're site isn't ready, you're going to lose out to your competitors.

You are missing the point. Just because it's fully functional on mobile doesn't mean its optimized for mobile. Those are two different things. A responsive site is built in a way that makes it mobile optimized whereas just having a regular site load on mobile is not optimal for the mobile experience.

Thats me also

As for the ecommerce site having a responsive theme can help with a number of factors and I believe google mentioned in one of their WMT vidoes that a resonsive theme is an seo plus factor.

Basically resonsive means responds to the browser (size / layout etc) being used giving a better user experience (apparently).

As mentioned by other fellow warriors here in this thread , I would strongly advise you to have a responsive theme installed for your website or make your site mobile responsive by customizing the theme. These days most of the sites are accessed equally in mobile phones as it was done by PCs & latops , so its becoming mandatory for a website to be mobile friendly.
Now-a-days professional freelance developers like us , do include responsive design as part of the project & quote them a fair price based on the complexity of the design & the project.
There is no such comparison between e-commerce & non e-commerce site in terms of mobile responsiveness , make your sites responsive & you will find the difference in the traffic , time sent & other analytics.

So in simple , go for mobile responsive design if its fairly priced .

Hope this helps.

Ah, I usedtoberubbish. They have nailed it! I can imagine your non committal to changing what already works perfect! But really, a different mobile experience makes your audience love you more even if it is not perceptible at first! If you are using WordPress, there are a ton of themes that already give you responsivity out of the box, and i just recently found a wordpress plugin that does the job awesomely! its called WPtouch Mobile Plugin, Enjoy

The problem with most mobilised eCommerce sites is they suck. Encouraging sales into ecommerce from a mobile user is difficult. The site has to be "thumb friendly", easy and natural to use. Not an easy thing to do. www.dicksmith.com.au (an "Australian" electronics store) is an example of a commercial mobile site that works and looks like it should on my iPhone. It's all about thumbs and is easy and intuitive to navigate.

Tons of great information on this thread. Everybody's right.

Responsive web pages are a MUST...especially in eCommerce, and especially now. A lot of industry thought leaders are predicting that 2014 is the year of mobile commerce.

And the key to mobile responsive design? Making sure that you DON'T leave anything out when you transfer from the desktop design to the mobile version of your site.

Hope this helps! Remember, when you're coming up with your mobile version...clean lines! Skeuomorphism is dead.

I can't stand responsive websites. I prefer to see the full website as you would on a pc.

Funny the majority say use responsive but most corporate ecommerce sites don't use responsive design but instead go for RESS/Adaptive or mobile optimized layouts pulling data from the same date feed instead...

Walmart
Bestbuy
Target
Adidas
American Airlines
Expedia
Hotels
eBay
Apple
Staples
Officedepot
Officemax
Sears

To name just a few...

Guess they must be all using the wrong approach!

Fact the only major retail corp that i know of that uses responsive is Starbucks, they do a relatively good job but i still believe there is room for improvement.

There's more to mobile than just responsive design... responsive is certainly cheaper and easier to deploy with a ready made template or solution but its not the true silver bullet that people make it out to be...

Ask yourselves why the above companies don't use responsive... it's certainly not because they cant afford to implement a responsive design, but i wager my money its primarily due to the end user experience.

Even Google doesn't use a responsive design for their main Google search page but also go with RESS - web pages dont really get much simpler than Google's home page so why not don't they use a responsive? End user experience perhaps?

End of the day use what you think is the best approach for you and your client - but do it with an educated conclusion based on an understanding that other solutions do exist out there and that you are fully knowledgeable of the pros and cons of all.

Hi,
Always install responsive design, because it automatically adapts to all screen sizes. Either it is desktop, laptop, notebook or smartphones.
Hope you find the answer helpful!

Thanks,
Regards

We are already in the mobile era where people shop through there mobile phones.

But i don't totally agree with this one... There's a gray area in this matter....
That really depend on what kind goods you are selling.....

If i were to buy through my mobile or ipad, i only buy goods which are 10 dollar below... I feel i have less risk... I am not confident using mobile because I can't type properly and some site does not provide all information when site is in mobile mode.

If I am buying a phone through ebay or a macbook online, I would do it on my computer.

But I recommend to use a responsive or bootstrap template to be on the trend incase you change your mind later. But the mobile adaption is always optional and template companies provide an option to disable it and use the default website view.

Here's my two cents:

At a MINIMUM your site needs to be mobile responsive. It impacts user experience and also your organic search position within google.

I'm on the fence about the RESS. Jay, i agree with you wholeheartedly. However, large companies' mobile sales volume is significant, thus they can devote resources to mobile optimization. When I have gone to an adaptive small business mobile site, or even a mobile version, it was just a horrible experience to the point I would switch back to the dekstop version (if they offered the choice) even if I was on my phone. Some of the bad experiences I had were:

bad layout
poor/missng menu options
ugly
missing features

The biggest problem- a mobile redirect from a specific page in the organic search to another page (or worse, the main page) when landing on the site.

The adaptive approach works well for large sites because we likely stored all our details while we had a full keyboard and don't have to fumble typing on a phone, so it shows much better results when you're looking at a large company's decision making process.

When you're smaller and you don't have enough mobile revenue to justify the development, then you have to go to the less expensive option-- responsive-- and make sure your phone numbers are easy to find and click.

You can increase sales 15 to 30% just by making sure that the mobile experience is absolutely amazing.