Your marketing director is thinking like a fourteen-year-old. “We need to go mobile to sustain our business. We need an iPhone app!”
The only problem with this statement? Nobody on your team knows how to develop an iPhone app. Heck, everyone on your team might be using Android phones and wouldn’t know where to begin.
But the most important way to solve this problem isn’t too think about HOW to develop an iPhone app for your business. The goal is to ask WHY you are developing an iPhone app. This article discusses the advantages of developing a fresh website on the WordPress platform versus developing a mobile phone app.
A website AND an “iPhone App”
Website technology has come a long way since you may have last updated the look of your website. Gone are the HTML landing pages and static content of yesterday. Replacing these archaic practices are new Content Management Systems (CMS) — WordPress being the most popular of them. With these new website building blocks, it is easy to login to a portal within your site and edit the content of the site.
Further still, the WordPress platform operates on plugins and themes to match your brand and goals. With WordPress, you can change the announcements on your front page. You can add functionality to achieve the needs of the business. You can modify colors. The website is in YOUR control.
Most importantly, with many WordPress themes, plugins, and custom WordPress websites, the look and feel can be made to match the look of an iPhone app.
So, rather than spend all of this money on an iPhone app, you can get a brand new website AND an app in the same package for less money.
Give your website that custom “iPhone app” feel!
Tools to make your WordPress website look like an iPhone app
WordPress has it’s share of tools to make your website look like an iPhone app. We invite you to check out one of our most recent client projects, where we added functionality to give the phone screen that app feel. Working some custom code with a popular plugin like Add to Home Screen for WordPress, we were able to modify the front page of the site to give people an option to turn the site into an App. Attached below is a gallery showing what some of this looks like:
You can also use tools like WP Touch to give your mobile website an App feel, though this plugin can be derivative and might not sell people on your brand. For that, there is custom web development and design.
Enabling Location Services on a Website
Additionally, you can tap into location services with websites. This is not just a feature of iPhone apps or mobile apps in general. With the GuideRI website, we were able to add Location Services to the website so there was no need to develop a custom application.
Everything about the site, from the way it feels to navigate, to the menu, to the sorting and filtering options, to GPS functionality is designed to mimic an iPhone app, but the only cost the business has to worry about is the cost of developing the supercharged site. There is no need to veer into iPhone app territory. Should GuideRI or any other business want to make an App, it is easier since much of the technology is already in place.
Are we missing an element of iPhone App Development?
At Slocum Studio, we are confident that we can turn your business website into a pseudo-iPhone app. Please let us know if you feel a major element of app development is missing from this resource or if you would like to turn your site into a dream app.
Give your website that custom “iPhone app” feel!
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