WordPress announced today that it has been working with Onswipe on a new WordPress plugin that makes sites more iPad-friendly or in their words, “reimagined for a touch experience”.
OnSwipe is a platform that helps publishers make their content more appealing on touch-enabled devices through web browsers.
The plugin makes your WordPress site iPad-optimized with HTML5, support for touch interactions, swiping, rotation, etc. WordPress says the functionality is already available and active for over 18 million blogs on WordPress.com. The plugin available for all self-hosted WordPress.org sites.
“With the launch of Apple’s iPad we have seen the future of computing and it is touch,” says WordPress’ Nick Momrik. “Nothing matches the visceral feel of navigating your digital world with your hands.”
“When you tap to view a post, you get to see the full content with a slick commenting interface and social sharing tools for Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com literally at your finger tips,” says Momrik. “It’s a lot of fun browsing sites with Onswipe.”
For publishers and webmasters the plugin means you have a new option for making your site more attractive to the growing number of iPad users (note that WordPress says they’ll be working on expansion to support other tablet devices). More and more people are going to be viewing your site on an iPad. You want to give them as enjoyable an experience as possible. The game has changed greatly from the days when all you had to worry about was what your site looked like on a desktop PC, or even just a PC and a mobile phone.
WordPress says it is seeing 750,000 page views a day for WordPress.com on iPads, and that the number continues to increase.
For iPad users, their web browsing experience should continue to improve as more sites take advantage of tools like this that make their sites more iPad-friendly. It will be interesting to see if increased user experience improvements from sites via the web browser will put a dent in tablet app downloads or creation/updates on the publishers’ end. A lot of sites may find it just as easy/appealing to make their site itself more tablet-friendly, rendering the need for another app useless or a waste of time and money.
