Responsive web design has been a popular topic in 2012. With Google noting that responsive design is the "preferred" method for developing smartphone sites, and enough bloggers re-posting on the idea without really looking deep enough into the subject, Googling "responsive web design" now makes you feel like the age of custom mobile websites has already come to its end.
But is it so?
Not so much, if you look at a couple of factors:
1. Big consumer brands (Macy's, Target, Walgreens) opt for a separate smartphone website, served on an m. URL. Coca-Cola’s Tom Daly argued against the responsive design during his presentation at the Mobile FirstLook conference:
“If you get into this HTML5, hybrid mindset and start pretending that a screen is a screen is a screen, you starting forgetting about the customer experience,” Mr. Daly said.
Instead, marketers should be focusing on delivering a differentiated experience in mobile that focuses on what on-the-go consumers are looking for.
2. If you monitor the mobile thought leadership sites like www.mobilecommercedaily.com, there's been quite a few discussions around the fact that simply repurposing desktop content for smartphones is no longer an option, and serving custom content for smartphones generates better experience and conversions.
3. With Google's latest focus on rewarding the best user experience versus SEO tricks, it would be weird if Google were to punish companies striving to make things easier for their on-the-go visitors.
When is responsive design a good fit?
In many cases it makes sense to go with the responsive design route. With RWD you are serving the exact same content to all devices, simply formatted differently via style sheets, which makes it much easier to maintain. For sites that offer content mostly for consumption (news sites, blogs) and content that updates very frequently, RWD's benefit of easy management is a huge plus.
However, for sites that are conversion-oriented responsive web design may not be the best choice, as it feeds too much content and makes it hard for the visitor to navigate to the needed information. Often responsive themes stack content on top of each other, so your important desktop sidebar areas (calls to actions or sign-up forms) end up being buried underneath long paragraphs of text, print coupons, a link to a job application, or other information your mobile visitor does not care about. (And yes, you can hide and rearrange certain elements, but that content will still always be downloaded. Besides, with so many device screen variations, the content need to be tested to make sure the end result is what you want).
In addition, mobile users often search for different keywords than the desktop users. Optimizing the content of the mobile site to emphasize the mobile keywords makes sense.
In many cases, a combination of both would be a better choice (e.g. serve a separate smartphone-optimized home page and conversion pages, but keep your blog and articles on the responsive design theme).
Another popular confusion is that responsive web design is a must for SEO. While RWD makes it easier to manage SEO by eliminating the need to worry about duplicate content or consolidating the link equity from two separate sites, it is certainly not a requirement for improving mobile search rankings. See this article for more detail on how to use the switchboard tags to avoid the above issue by telling Google that the desktop and mobile sites are part of the same online entity.
And finally, here is Google's take on it in recommendations for smartphone sites:
Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.
If responsive design is not the best option to serve your users, Google supports having your content being served using different HTML. The different HTML can be on the same URL or on different URLs, and Googlebot can handle both setups appropriately if you follow our recommendations.
As SEO expert Bryson Meunier noted, the solo reason for this responsive design rave could be simply due to the fact that "Google Recommends Responsive Design" makes a far better blog headline and tweet than "Google Recommends Responsive Design But Supports Whatever Configuration Is Best for Your Users if Responsive Design Isn't It."