Designing a WordPress Blog for the Apple iPad
April 4, 2010 | Posted in bloggingIf you’re like me, you’ve been HIGHLY curious about the release of the new Apple iPad. I’m not posting to advertise for the iPad or to even sway you to purchase one. Instead I wanted to discuss the issues of iPad (and iPhone) compatibility when it comes to the design of your WordPress photography blog or blogsite.
Let’s start the discussion with a new article that came out today: http://www.wplover.com/1670/getting-your-wordpress-themes-ready-for-apple-ipad
Go ahead, I’ll give you a few minutes to read it. I’ll be waiting right here.
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Ok, so now that you’ve read it, I wanted to bring up a couple important points from the article that highly concerns photographers with WordPress blogs.
a) Layout.
Some of you have VERY wide blogs, over the standard 960 pixels. On most hi-res monitors these days (and I know you have one of them if you’re a photographer like me who likes to work on one while editing photos), that width is just fine. But many are not aware that there are still people out there with smaller resolution monitor settings. It was fine and dandy to assume that those dinosaur monitors would eventually burn out and become extinct, but with the emergence of small browser machines (i.e. iPad and iPhone), this should still be a very important issue.
What can you do about it? Well, just make sure that important content that you want people to see and read don’t go too far beyond the 960 pixels width. Regardless of the fact that iPads and iPhones have easy zoom features, it doesn’t make your site very user-friendly if you force some of your visitors to constantly zoom in and out to view your content.
b) Flash.
We’re talking Adobe Flash of course. 90% of you have the Flashfader plugin to create the flash slideshow in your header. Just admit it, you have one. So yeah, it’s pretty sucky that Apple still hasn’t given support for iPad and iPhone to view Flash content, but it’s not like we can tell all the buyers (and yes, I do have an iPhone so I’m one of them) to stop buying the products because they don’t support Flash. It is reasonable though to find an alternative method of showing our photos in a non-Flash format.
So how do you go about doing that? Well, I’ve recently found that using the Nextgen Gallery plugin along with the Nextgen Smooth plugin allows you to create photo slideshows that simulate a Flash show very closely, without the Flash. It’s javascript based, which Apple supports, and loads quickly and efficiently. Ugh, but what if you don’t want to redo your Flash slideshow? Well….you can have a static image replace the Flash if the browser detects that Flash isn’t supported. So instead of a blue box, the viewer will see a static image like your logo or something like that. This can be done pretty easily with some css coding that I can do for you.
Louann Benson wrote: Yes our blog has the flashfader header in our SLR Lounge Wordpress blog. What does it cost for you to write the code so that we can have an alternative static image for Iphones and ipad users? The blog is www.impressionsphotostudio.com/blog. I am a part-time photographer just in case you might think I am one of those rich photographers lol. Would like for you to do this if the price is affordable. I went with the SLR Lounge theme because it was free and couldn't bring myself to pay the prophoto prices for a blog that looks just the same and has the same learning curve. (06/11/11, 7:51 am)