iPhone® & iPad® Web Design For Dummies®

Assessing Your Current Web Presence

The first step in developing a plan is to assess what you have (or don’t have) in the here and now. If you’re creating a completely new website, you need quite a different plan of action than if you’re developing a new version of an existing site for the iPhone or iPad. Here are a few common starting places and issues to consider:

Create an iPhone/iPad site from scratch: If you’re creating a new site from scratch, be sure to start your plan from the beginning. In many ways, this option is the simplest because you don’t have to accommodate legacy content or features that would be difficult to transfer to these new devices.

You already have a modern site designed with CSS (cascading style sheets): If your site is already up and running and you created the site following contemporary web standards (which means that you used CSS and HTML to separate the formatting from the content), you’re off to a good start. The key point is that separating your design from your content enables you to create your mobile site design from existing content much more easily.

You have a very old website: If you created your site years ago and the design is integrated ...