What's the difference between Adaptive design vs Responsive design?

[campbelljof]

The goal of responsive web design and development is to make your website fully functional at any display size. This involves a fair amount of coding knowhow, understanding of composition at different sizes and a clear image of how the scaling process works; in other words, it should always be done by a professional. Mobile-optimizing plugins can only offer so much help.

Adaptive layouts are designed with specific resolutions and display sizes in mind. Instead of offering a fluid shift depending on the size of the window, an adaptive layout checks what resolution your browsing window is and loads the display code for the webpage in a different way in order to display properly for your resolution. It may sound like a lot of extra work, but adaptive design offers a level of fine-tuning and control that responsive layouts simply can’t. With full control over the design at multiple resolutions, you can be sure that your website is always displaying exactly how you want it too—or even how it needs to.