Should You Build an iPad Enabled Website?
By Anna Johnson on March 22nd, 2010The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio (NPR) plan to launch iPad-only versions of their websites in readiness for the launch of Apple’s iPad ‘slate computer’.
Each site will be designed so that an iPad user who arrives at WSJ.com or NPR.com will be automatically directed to the iPad version of the relevant site.
Since the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash technology, there won’t be any Flash on their iPad sites. This may pose some challenges for the sites since both currently make extensive use of Flash – in ads, videos and in the form of NPR’s audio player.
So… should you follow suit and develop an iPad version of your website (provided you don’t use any Flash)?
It may not be worth worrying about now – and, hey, many of us are yet to develop mobile-friendly versions of our websites – but you can probably add it to the ‘may have to do this’ pile.
Meanwhile, as Sarah Perez points out in ReadWriteWeb, the need to create so many versions of one website undermines the idea of the web as “the one unifying “platform” that works anywhere, on any device, no matter what hardware is used to access it.”
Sarah Perez continues:
“thanks to varying screen sizes and differing feature sets (most notably Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on their mobile devices), those who want to provide compelling content to all their site visitors will be forced to re-code their site multiple times.”
On the other hand, let’s be entrepreneurial about this. Maybe the seeds of a huge business opportunity lies in this problem: technology that allows you to easily develop different versions of one website.
Source: Sarah Perez, “NPR and WSJ Building iPad-Only Websites,” ReadWriteWeb, March 16, 2010
