How to Get Your Website Computer Tablet Ready
Tablet sales are sweeping the country. Best Buy has confirmed that since the iPad came out, laptop PC sales have dropped by over 40%. Over 15 million iPads have already been sold, with many more to come in the future. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, getting your website tablet ready is now a necessity.
Here’s how to get your website tablet ready.
=> Make Your Buttons Larger
Buttons that are easy to click can be very hard to press on with a finger. Remember that a mouse pointer is only a few pixels wide, but someone who needs to click on something with their finger is often much less precise.
Small buttons are frustrating for tablet users. Enlarge the buttons on your site so it’s easier for tablet users to use.
=> Use CSS to Make Your Width Fluid
Rather than using a fixed width, which looks very strange on the tablet, go for a fluid width CSS layout.
This allows the CSS to adapt the page width to whatever device is displaying it. If it’s on a large screen laptop PC, it’ll expand its width. If it’s on the small width iPad, the CSS will shrink the width down without distorting the website.
=> On WordPress? Get the OnSwipe Plug-In
If your site is hosted on WordPress, then get the OnSwipe plug-in to make your site tablet friendly.
OnSwipe is a plug-in already used by 18 million blogs, with integration features that make it easy for tablet users to view and use the website.
=> Cut the Flash
Unfortunately, Apple has decided not to support Flash on both iPads and iPhones. If you have a flash-based website or a website that has Flash incorporated in it, chances are your website won’t display properly on the tablet.
Flash has traditionally been quite a slow media and has had other disadvantages as well, such as not being able to be spidered by search engines. If you want to be tablet friendly, now might be the time to cut the Flash from your site.
=> Test It!
Finally, get an iPad and test out your new website version. What’s the user experience like? What do you like and what do you find frustrating?
Make any changes you need to make, then have a few friends and associates test it out on the iPad as well. Continue this process of refinement until you’re happy with your new, tablet-friendly website.
Getting your website tablet friendly shouldn’t take a long time, nor should it be an expensive process. Even if you hired a designer to do it, it shouldn’t cost more than $500 or so and would likely cost a lot less. Doing it yourself, if you have the CSS skills, could take as little as a day or two.
This article originally appeared here: http://patch.com/california/burlingame-hillsborough/how-to-get-your-website-computer-tablet-ready
