We love doing web design for Apple devices here at kc web design Kent. It felt like the rumours were circulating for months but on Wednesday it was finally announced – The new Apple iPad with retina display.
Again, Apple has ‘revolutionised’ the tablet market by bringing high definition displays to a device barely bigger than a book. Videos, photos, games will all no look fantastic and for a device thats mainly used for consuming media its the perfect way forward. But what does this mean for your existing, old skool, 72dpi website – how will that look on the new iPad?
What will my current website design look like?
The iPad 1 & 2 both have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, but the new iPad is 2048 x 1536 which is double the original iPads size. App builders will now be quickly making bigger versions of all the graphics for their iPad apps, like iPhone app developers do already with the iPhone 4, but what about websites that only have one set of what will soon be described as ‘lo-res’ resources?
Because the screens on these new devices look so sharp and crisp with no way of picking out individual pixels, whatever is seen on them is going to exaggerate any imperfections. Your basic website with an ok design might look fine on a desktop PC but seen on the iPad 3’s HD display may well show up badly designed websites. It’s even more important now to think ahead and plan for your users best experience and all of these devices.
One way we can design for these new devices is by building responsive websites. A responsive website design serves different content, images and styles based on the device. So, for an iPhone we would server lo-res content for quick loading on the move, some higher resolution images to the iPhone 4 and the same again for the iPad. Some standard desktop styles for the original iPads and some hi-res images for the new iPad 3 to take advantage of that lovely screen.
It does add more development time to a web design project but when you see your website looking sharp and crisp on the new retina display it’ll be worth it. And if your brand is one that will be used a lot on mobile devices, its even more important to take advantage of what these devices offer.
At kc web design Kent we build responsive websites for all devices so if you would like you current website changed to a responsive design and would like to target the new iPad 3 in all it’s HD glory then give us a call.