A company's desktop site being different from their mobile site?

[justin]

I’m pretty green at web dev and was wondering when you visit a company’s site and resize the window, and the site does not adjust responsively, you figure, “oh this site is not responsive”, but when you access the same site on your phone you discover that they have a mobile optimized site that you couldn’t access from the desktop, I was wondering what process is being used? I know it could sound like a dumb question but I just wanted to know what is going on behind the scene or under the hood, I normally use Dev Tools to look at what is going on. I recently had a friend tell me that liked a certain site and wanted theirs to look the same, I noticed this process going on and was wondering is jQuery mobile or something else? example sites would be http://enchantmentresort.com/
or reddressboutique

I was just try it figure out what is going on because I have always been taught to make the site adjust to the screen size where you could see it happening by resizing the window. Any info is much appreciated!

[__]

what process is being used?

There are different ways to approach it. The most common is by using browser sniffing (checking the user-agent string) to send mobile devices to a different domain (e.g., m.example.com).

I have always been taught to make the site adjust to the screen size…

Which is a far better approach.

Maintaining two different sites has many disadvantages: you have to keep your UA-sniffing up to date, some mobile devices have such large screens that forcing them to use a “mobile” site is frustrating for users …not to mention the fact that you have to maintain two different sites, when one could be doing the job.

[nixnerd]

In addition to everything already said, dedicated ‘mobile’ sites have profound esss eee oohh implications as well. If not done correctly, and hell, maybe even if done ‘correctly,’ the mobile site may be viewed by Google as duplicate content. And Google’s opinion is essentially fact at this point and we have to deal with it.

It’s just a bad idea on all fronts and those who do it are literally 5 years behind.

Edit: I wanted my quotes to match.

[Senff]

Correct me if I’m wrong but this is what’s known as “adaptive” (as opposed to “responsive”).

Additionally, it doesn’t have to be two different sites. Sometimes this is done by just serving a completely different style sheet based on the screen width (on load) or browser type/version.

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