Building a Site for the iPhone
With all the craze and hype surrounding the new iPhone we’ve decided to undertake the seemingly daunting task of re-creating a Dogbark.com that works on the iPhone. I just picked up my iPhone this past Sunday, and though I love it, I have to say that re-creating a website for it can be quite a nightmare. The rest of this will be a few do’s and don’ts that I have already figured out, if you are looking to develop for the iPhone keep reading to see the start of how we’re approaching it.
This is just the beginning…
The first big decision that many of you will run into will answer the question “do I need to redo my site content, or just change my stylesheet?” I think in many cases just re-writing you CSS can fix many issues that your iPhone will run into navigating a website. There are a lot of sniffers out there on Apple’s site to switch the stylesheet if the iPhone is detected, so that’s definitely an option.
For Dogbark, we didn’t have much choice but to completely dig into and strip out content. If you’ve been to our main site lately, you’ll notice it’s got a ton of content, pictures, and quite a few things like the blog, account manager, order processing, and other things that we don’t really make sense on the iPhone. We started by thinking “why would a user want to look at our site on their iPhone?” Maybe to see our services, to call us with a question, to figure out how to setup their email for their phone… etc. So we basically started from scratch with a new site layout, design, and everything for the iPhone.
I’ll be posting my accomplishments and frustrations on here, so keep posted for updates about what we’re doing with the iPhone. Mostly, this is a learning experiment for me to figure out how the iPhone really works, and so far it’s working well, but it’s definitely not easy to get everything running, that’s for sure.
If you are developing a site for the iPhone, I’d recommend reading through this article at apple’s site, it’s awesome!!