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What the iPad Means for Web Designers
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on June 14th, 2010)
It's Monday again and the start of yet another week. Man they sure do seem to be flying by at the moment. For us it's the start of quite a big week ... with some big projects coming up for several clients we've got to spend this week tidying up a whole bunch of loose ends so we can jump right into those big projects when they're ready to go.
Unfortunately one of those "loose ends” involves building a small website that we haven't even started on yet so at this end of the week things are looking just a little daunting.
One of the things we have begun to think about when it comes to website design is just how the sites we build are going to look on an iPad ... and just how well they might work on an iPad too. While iPads are still very new I think that there's little doubt that they are going to go a long way towards revolutionizing how people interact with websites and the way a website looks and works when viewed in an iPad is something we really do need to be thinking about.
While it's well-known that Steve Jobs does not want to allow Flash on in the iPad and so anything on your website that uses Flash will not going to appear when an iPad user lands on one of your sites there are plenty of other things we need to look at.
Font sizes
What font size are you using on your websites? If you tend to use quite small font sizes for the text on your sites then iPad users are going to have a problem because pages with plenty of text are going to be very hard to read if you've used a small font size for the text.
Page layout
Are the pages on your website stuffed full of content with very little white space in between? If they are then an iPad user is going to see a jumble of content crammed into the iPad's small screen.
Think of what it's like to look into a shop window where there is heaps of stuff all crammed in on top of one another. In those sort of instances it's hard to find something that you might be looking for and you'll soon walk on to the next shop because it's just too much of a strain trying to sort through that visual jumble.
Well if you cram lots of content into your web pages without leaving much in the way of empty space between the blocks of text, images and advertising the iPad will display your pages as a visual jumble that no one will want to spend time looking through.
Navigation
I've never ever been a big fan of drop-down menus for navigation. In fact I can count the number of times I've used drop-down navigation websites that I've built for clients over the years on the fingers of one very deformed hand.
As far as I'm concerned the problems that drop-down navigation have caused ... problems like covering up important content on the page ... not being available for people who surf with Javascript turned off ... just being plain annoying to use ... have far outweighed any advantages that type of navigation might have.
Now, all those sites that have used drop-down navigation are going to be unusable for anyone using an iPad because they can't hover over the menu link to get it to drop down. If an iPad user does manage to get a drop-down menu to appear it only stays visible for a very short time and then it's gone and the surfer can't move on to the page that they want to reach.
Even if you don't use a drop-down menu just how close have you set your navigation links to one another? A couple of weeks ago ... before the iPad was released ... we completed a website for a client where each navigation link was only a line break and some padding away from the next link.
That may be too close for an iPad user ... they don't have the same precise movement of the cursor that a normal computer user has with a mouse so that site may need to be redesigned a whole lot sooner than we expected.
I could go on with a few more examples of problems that iPad users are going to have with the websites that have been designed up until now but I'll leave it for you to dig deeper and see what you might have to change.
Of course the iPad may be just another bit of technology that doesn't really gain much acceptance by consumers. If it doesn't then we won't have to worry about changing our site designs will we?
But of course the reality is that the iPad is being sold in huge numbers and the chances of it not becoming an important tool for surfing the web are very slim so we need to be building sites with the iPad in mind.
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