Make your real estate site look good on the iPad

It used to be that to design a nice webpage you only had to be concerned about what it looked like in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Now, however, there are not only more browsers to worry about but also various devices and screen sizes.
For commercial real estate websites, compatibility with mobile browsers will become increasingly important. Your prospects are likely to look up your site when they are actually 'being mobile' and looking at your building. You've got to worry about what your site looks like on a smart phone or an iPad.
Flash is used heavily in real estate web sites. It makes the sites behave beautifully and the graphic quality can be very high. It used to be that you could count on 99% of browsers supporting flash, but not any more. There's been a lot of publicity about the iPad's (and iPhone's) intentional lack of support of Flash. BlackBerry currently does not support Flash, but newer models apparently will soon. You have to assume that your mobile visitors won't have Flash.
Much of the tiny text and elegant navigation on many websites are hard to deal with on small screens. As desktop and laptop screens have gotten bigger, so too has the screen area used by web designers. On an iPad, it might be hard to click on a tiny link or a little scroll-down menu.
Designing websites for commercial real estate must focus on the experience of the mobile user. Here are three important strategies:

1. Don't use Flash. If you do are already committed to a Flash based design, make sure it 'degrades' elegantly. Your site should serve up alternate content for non-Flash enabled browsers.
2. Don't use tiny fonts. Test your site on a smaller screen. Make sure you can actually click on links on an iPad. Yes, visitors can zoom in and out on your pages, but that's no fun.
3. Keep the design simple. Don't squander the small area that your viewers may be limited too. Keep pages simple clean and focused.

I took a look at our public, building marketing sites on the iPad and I am glad to see that they look great. Here are a few pictures of what 21 St Clair Ave. East looks like on the iPad:

The site is clear and legible and easy to navigate with the touch-screen

Stacking Plans and availability reports work very well

Javascript tools such as Google maps and Yelp are fully functional

The iPad has native support for PDF floor plans.


Don't rely on special plug-ins or developing an iPad app. Most visitors will not bother to install special tools just to view your content. To maximize the return on your design effort, the best strategy would be to build straight forward, HTML standards compliant web pages that look great on all platforms.