Responsive sites or separate mobile website?

Is it better to have a responsive site or just have a separate site for mobile devices? It is for a kitchen design studio and the images are really important on the site. Please point me towards the right direction!

I always go mobile-first design, and it's recommended for SEO. Use something like a responsive image engine to scale your photos.

I would definitely go with having a responsive site to begin with. Otherwise you have to worry about duplicate content issues and there's more chances for things to go wrong if you forget to do things like canonical urls. It could really hurt your site by just a simple mistake.

Also, a responsive site is better because you have desktop users using all different screen resolutions.

i wouldn't touch a non responsive now. The growth in the net is coming from tablets, and mobiles now.

Dienummer,

I agree with the others, I would go with a responsive design. I think the benefit for SEO is marginal in terms of having a separate mobile or responsive design (if there really is any impact). I would use the responsive because its less to worry about. Whenever you make changes the whole site will be updated as opposed to a separate mobile site where you would have to make changes twice.

Best,

Shawn

Many responsive designs are not done well, especially for critical sidebar features like ads or others that get pushed to the bottom and do not get clicked much at the bottom.
IMO the best solution is a responsive website to deal with different resolutions and a mobile site to deal with lower resolutions and optimizing the space for phones.
If you are using bootstrap for instance then you can hide/show things based on resolution and that is also a great solution, such as putting ads hidden between post loop in Wordpress sites to only show on small resolution. Most premade themes that use bootstrap probably do not take advantage of this well enough.

In your case, you could go either way, but a responsive website and no mobile one would be easier to maintain. Just preview the site on a phone and check areas like your contact form, number, and portfolio

And you don't have to worry about duplicate content if you add rel="canonical" tag to mobile site

Yeah duplicate content isn't a reason to not have a mobile site. I agree regarding most responsive designs/themes being poor. They respond to resolution but the loading times can be horrible, and loading times impact your rankings just as much as duplicate content (which is to say very little Loading times, however, negatively affect the user experience, while dupe content does not.

I think it depends most on your site to be honest. I do responsive for two reasons, I am lazy right now, and my sites content does not lend itself to purchases from mobile devices.

An argument can be made that every site will be accessed via non traditional computer device sooner than later so you should have a mobile specific website. It really comes up to what you think your site will be in a week/month/year.

If you have a long term plan then invest now, do a mobile site and enjoy the benefits in the future.

From my experience the mobile only site is OK but even when done properly according to Google WMT I noticed no change in SERPs, from a point of UX I am going with the responsive design and even getting rid of the old mobile sites in favor of one well done responsive site.

Responsive is the way to go.

Responsive all the way, no discussion possible.

I'm going seperate for now, and I'll have to be be careful managing the content for dupes etc.

When I do a re-build, I'll do responsive, and will build for mobile first, and add stuff in for bigger screens. . I think this is at least 18 months away

But I think trying to engineer the current site to be responsive is a waste of time, and the result would be horrible.

For my niche,