[ikk157]

Hey folks,
For some time its making me wonder about what's best theme type for web platforms, A Responsive Theme or having a seperate theme for Desktop & smaller device each.

Websites like facebook, twitter uses seperate theme for mobile users, While Github on the other hand uses a Responsive theme instead.

So which one really would be best ?


Well currently from developers points for view, I liked the seperate theme option more durable

Here are view of its pros (as I see):

• Easy & Faster development: By using 2 seperate themes, it would be easy for developer to manage the themes in more faster way and gives him more freedom while designing it since he won't have to think about both theme's template at same time.
  
• Load time Decrease: For mobile theme when dev don't want to show few elements, He can simply remove those codes from theme in case of seperate themes.While In responsive themes, Dev really don't have much choice other than Hiding the element via css which still would consume website loading time though it won't be shown. Responsive Themes have this as a major drawback which makes me uncomfortable to work with.
  

But I see few cons also for having seperate mobile theme:
Like in an article, Google has specifically said that responsive design “is Google’s recommended configuration.”
So I guess it would lead to degrade SEO maybe?
Though Google also says: a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.
So as long as the website have same link for both themes, we are good for SEO.

These were my thoughts, I also want to know from rest of you about same. And which one you like more and why?

I am still currently thinking about whether this forum should have 2 seperate themes for different devices or have a responsive theme. Hopefully I would able to get into some conclusion after this discussion.

Regards,

The short answer would be: it really depends.

With a responsive theme, mobile users might face issues every here and there... for example: issues with the text editor on mobile with the current post4vps responsive theme.

However, with two separate themes for each, there might be missing stuff in mobile themes which the desktop theme has. For example, the post4vps mobile theme had many missing features that the desktop users had (I don’t remember which specifically as that theme no longer works).

Also, having two separate themes might change the way desktop users see content compared to mobile users. For instance, what might look perfectly sized on desktop, might be too huge on mobile. (Things such as text size, pictures, so on...). Not to mention that any issues with one theme would be annoying to describe to users who use the other theme.