How Many Websites Should We Build?

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Chris Coyier on

Someone emailed me:

What approach to building a site should I take?

  1. Build a single responsive website
  2. Build a site on a single domain, but detect mobile, and render a separate mobile site
  3. Build a separate mobile site on a subdomain

It’s funny how quickly huge industry-defining conversations fade from view. This was probably the biggest question in web design and development this past decade, and we came up with an answer: It’s #1, you should build a responsive website. Any other answer and you’re building multiple websites and the pain from that comes from essentially doubling the workload, splitting teams, communication problems across those teams, inconsistencies across the sites, and an iceberg of other pain points this industry has struggled with for ages.

But, the web is a big place.

This emailer specifically mentioned imdb.com as their example. IMDB is an absolutely massive site with a large team (they are owned by Amazon) and lots of money flying around. If the IMDB team decides they would be better off building multiple websites, well that’s their business. They’ve got the resources to do whatever the heck they want.