Adaptive Website Design

As the reach of the Internet increases, it also presents new challenges / opportunities to web design and web development companies. From the humble HTML to responsive web design to native mobile apps, there is a phenomenal growth in the techniques and technology available for web development. In this article, we look at adaptive websites.

An Adaptive web design is a website development technique that attempts to make the website look good on all the devices that view it. An adaptive web design gauges the device that is accessing it, and may also change the content delivered to each device depending upon the area available, not just the size of the design area. Thus, the website may look entirely different depending upon which device is accessing it. For example, for a desktop client, an adaptive website would show the entire content, but for a mobile client, it might show just threadbare website content. This technique especially comes in handy when your company website has rich media like audio or video; for a mobile device, you instruct the webpage to simply not load or show these elements. Advanced adaptive websites use sophisticated user agent detection scripts to identify the device accessing it, and deliver the best possible version of the website based on available capacity of that device.

It is important to make a distinction between adaptive 'web design' and adaptive 'layouts'  Adaptive layouts rely solely on media queries while adaptive websites also use progressive enhancement techniques.