Give enough space - If it is a mouse pointer it can click, select small buttons, links. You need more space and area for a touch. It is obviously good to have a larger buttons and have little bit more space around them ( Padding ). Even with the links you can do a similar trick but you might have already noticed that it is bit hard to click on the text links than buttons. So, give simple and nice buttons to navigate through your website.
Option to increase the Font size would be another effective way to make it touch screen friendly. However, most of the touch screen OS gives zoom in and zoom out functionality with fancy multi touch.
Touch Screen ready Web Forms - Web forms is another area that required some alternations. Again you have to use bigger web form elements (Text boxes, drop down-lists and etc ) in order to make it easy to touch and select each field. Get rid of the boring default web forms and pimp it to be filled and submit easily on touch pads.
Make sue you do not allow users to fill all the unnecessary information. Make your form short and simple. (Not only effective in touch screen). People hate typing in touch screen and yes they are too lazy and worried to fill out lot of personal information.
Loading time and the size of the web page one of the primary issue with the mobile devices. Most of the devices come with expensive data plans and have a very limited download limit. However, this is not something new. It is been a good webmaster practice to some up with simple website that loads fast. Of course Google loves it as well and primary point when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation.
Browser Compatibility ( New Challenges ) webmasters nightmare. Each web browser has different characteristics and creating a website to work perfectly on each browser need lots of skills and patience. I think Tablet PC and iPad add more challenges. For example iPad dose not have a flash player and Android cannot run Java Vitual Machine very well. Now these limitations need to be considered before design or redesign your website.
Width and height of the page - Most of the modern tablet PCs have high resolutions screens. However it will be easy to have simple pages that dose not have to scroll sideways.
Is it necessary to built a separate tablet version? .mobi was started to have a mobile version of your website and it is not really active at the movement. No one bother to use the .mobi domain names, instead they use mydomain.com/mobile, mydomainname.com/m or m.mydomainname.com. I don’t think even with the tablet PCs .mobi will not be live. If you really have a website that is targeted big computer screen or flash base website you may require to have a new area for tablet PC users. It is not necessary as tablet PC s support most of the websites options pretty well. If you really needed and decide to go for separate version for tablet PCs I would recommend to go for application.
Test you site on Tablet PC and check how easy to navigate and how well your website respond to the touch. Something that webmaster need to consider building a website. Feel free to share your thoughts ideas and comments are welcome.
