Hi, i have been reading up a lot about responsive design lately… will responsive design do away with the need for having a mobile. prefix at the start of a url (mobile.sitename.com) or do responsive designs tend to keep the mobile.sitename.com
No, when you use a responsive design all you do is setup media queries that handle all the page widths, image sizes and font sizes for example and that’s it. The only time you would only ever use a subdomain/subfolder is when your mobile version of the site is 100% different from that main site which would be a bad design anyway.
These are two very different approaches. Having a separate mobile version of a site (e.g. at [noparse]m.mysite.com[/noparse]) is a fair undertaking, and is better suited to very large sites with a big budget, or sites that need to vary their offerings to mobile users greatly.
A gentler and simpler option is to serve the same site to all users, and just modify the layout via CSS. Each site owner / developer has to weigh up which is the best option in each case.
Disagree. Depending on the complexity of business and user goals the interface may need to change to accommodate different goals based on device. This is something that constantly is brought up in the context of what a user on the go needs in comparison to one sitting at home. CSS can only change what something looks like it can’t go as far to change an entire site workflow. When a change in workflow is necessary than a dedicated mobile version is best to eliminate carrying out processes for items that are not needed. With responsive design though all you can do is hide those things while still incurring the cost of server-side processes necessary to place them on the page.
Yep, like Facebook.
To be fair though I think if your asking this question that the site in question is probably not of scale nor complexity that would *require/benefit from a dedicated mobile site. Going back to question not until CSS can change server-side logic which will be never…
Also, the m. pattern that many dedicated mobile sites follow has no real relevance to the matter. m. could just as well be f**k. … Seriously, it could be any sub-domain.
About a month ago I started to convert an existing site using a script from @DeathShadow60.
http://cutcodedown.com/codeExamples/fluidDemo/template.html
I am still tweaking some stuff but the majority has been done.
The latest site was designed I started a week ago, designed from scratch and was a lot easier although working it still requires “Tarting Up” 
As mentioned above whether to use a mobile subdomain depends on the size and complexity of your site.
Can you supply a link to the site you are contemplating the changes?
thanks for the replies guys… it all makes sense now 
A few things to ponder about.
Responsive web design == CSS. Mobile web site == Content. Totally different.
But yes, if your site is already optimized for reasonable speeds, reasonable bandwidths and reasonable device processing power, a different content aimed at mobile users is not productive. But…
Desktop != fast and limitless data connection. Mobile != slow and capped connection.
Even if you need to streamline your content for less fortunate connections (and it should be more data expensive versus less data expensive, not desktop versus mobile) you’d still benefit from responsive.
Like it or not, responsive is what you’ll need for mobile too. Think mobile landscape versus mobile portrait. While not limited too. Think rotating TV sets, from landscape to portrait and vice-versa.
Ok, cool, thanks…
I agree with oddz’ post overall, but of course the problem with this statement is, the user on the go might have a whole darn tablet, netbook, car GPS, etc and the user at home may be on a phone. There is important user context here, but frankly without some input from them, we don’t know it. We can try to guess it at best.
This.
Deciding if there’s going to be separate websites for separate devices will completely depend on if you believe there must be separate content for these. We don’t actually have responsive content yet, though at least you can offer links to the “other” version everywhere.
One thing to be aware of is, if there are separate sites and one site’s page shows up in search results for a query, and the user tries to select that result, they should not be redirected to the main page of whatever you’ve built for their device. That defeats the purpose of getting indexed by search anyway, and it’s a known problem for sites who try to detect your device or screen size and redirect (usually only to the main page).
well said, thanks for your reply…