There are two standard options for creating a mobile website, one being a separate website that only shows for mobile browsers and the other being making your existing website responsive.

There are benefits to both, so it can be difficult to decide whether you want to build a separate site or modify your current site to be responsive.

Separate website:

A separate website has some advantages although currently responsive is gaining more and more popularity due to how versatile it is to create and use.

One reason to choose a separate site for mobile visitors would be that it is built from the ground up to be compatible with most major mobile browsers and operating systems which in turn guarantees compatibility and ensures that buttons, banners and text is easily legible when viewed on a small screen.

As it is a separate mobile site it also means that the code is optimized to be as light in footprint as possible and pages tend to load quicker if you are browsing using a mobile network as you do not need to load the entire desktop site.

A separate site for mobile would normally however require more maintenance and upkeep as content won’t automatically match that of your main website.

Responsive Design:

The main benefit from choosing a responsive design is that it will automatically adjust/scale to the resolution and device that your visitors are browsing with which will always provide them with a similar experience to visitors browsing on a desktop computer as no content is changed but merely adapted to fit.

Another benefit is that your website will have a single URL as sometimes mobile sites are hosted separately and therefore will need to be marketed and optimized in terms of SEO seperately as well.

Responsive sites are usually also cheaper to build depending on if your main website is compatible and responsiveness is added into the design from the start.

What to choose in 2015?

Ultimately I personally would always opt for a responsive way to deal with mobile visitors as it just offers so many benefits in terms of SEO and simplicity that this definitely seems to be the way forward.

Responsive also seems to be gaining more and more popularity and nowadays some of the issues such as legibility have been entirely solved by correct styling depending on the amount of pixels in your browser window and the usage of Bootstrap among other ways to create a website.