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I suppose I should have expected to feel this way today. After all I did know that I was going to spend three hours last night shut in a room with 100 other nerdy ... geeky ... web designers and coders. But I did hope that things might be a little different.

It's been several years since I forced myself to spend some hours with another ... similar ... group and I had thought that in the intervening years these sort of people might have changed.

Sadly this new bunch haven't changed in the slightest ... they're just like the last lot ... so totally full of themselves and their latest little innovations that they can't see ... or believe ... that they could be totally wrong or that there might be another way of doing things

Last night the talk was mostly about responsive web design and they all thought that responsive design was the only way to go. There was simply no point in considering anything else now that they could design a website that would look good ... at least what they classified as "good" ... on everything from a desktop to a mobile phone.

Now you may have seen me talk with some enthusiasm about responsive web design and there was a time when it really did look as though it had some potential ... and it may yet have that potential ... but, in my humble opinion, it certainly hasn't achieved that potential yet and there are some experts who are beginning to think that responsive design may never be more than just a dead end.

So why have I changed my mind and why are others beginning to question the concept of responsive design?

Speed
Well let's start with what's really important to the people that look at the websites that we design. Now we all know that they hate slow loading sites ... they want almost instant gratification regardless of whether they're looking at porn or looking at a cafe's menu. They don't want to be kept waiting ... but guess what?

Even one of the major fanboys at last night's gathering admitted that if you want a website that will load fast on a mobile phone then a responsive design is not going to deliver the speed you want. Responsive web sites take time to load on mobile phones but a purpose-built website designed for mobile phones will load much faster.

So speed is one reason why responsive website design is not all that the fanboy choir would have you believe.

SEO
Then there's the small matter of search engine optimisation. A website that has been designed for mobile devices and is optimised for mobile search results will almost always rank much higher than a normal website when someone does a search on their mobile device and that search includes a mobile related term.

Not only does Google tend to return mobile friendly sites more frequently in their results when the initial search is done on a mobile phone, but research has shown that searchers often include a mobile related term when they are doing a search for something.

So if you have a non-responsive design for your website and a mobile version as well you can target one set of keywords for the big-screen site and another set of keywords for your mobile site rather than trying to rank one site for absolutely everything.

Simplicity
While most of us don't build huge multi-page websites here in adult, some of us will be ... or have been ... involved in building those sites for mainstream so either remember or imagine what the navigation looked like for those sites.

Undoubtedly there were lots of links to lead people to the various pages and that means that the navigation was probably quite involved. Now think about how you would make that navigation easy to understand and easy to follow for someone who is looking on a mobile phone.

At the same time as you're thinking about the navigation think about what people are doing when they're using their mobile phone to look at websites. They're either doing it to be entertained or to get fast access to important information. Are they going to get either of those needs satisfied if they're fumbling through a large multi-page website on a mobile phone?

I doubt it. So why force potential customers to do that? Why not make life easier for them ... and achieve a win/win outcome ... simply by giving them a mobile-friendly, cut-down version of the main website?

Sadly, it seems that the latest crop of eager-beaver web designers still can't think beyond the end of their nose and are more interested in what's cool and geeky rather than what works and might put food on the table for their clients.

Now you wouldn't be that silly now would you?