The Implications of Tablets in the Workforce

It was March 2010. Apple had just announced its iPad tablet. Many analysts were quick to label the announcement a big mistake by the Silicon Valley giant.

But more than a year later, it’s apparent that they were dead wrong. Apple’s iPad has been a huge success, as reflected by the company’s recent earnings. And today, Apple’s second-in-command Tim Cook said “86 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are deploying iPads, up from 75 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list in the last quarter.” That’s a huge figure – and something that every web designer cannot afford to ignore.

Tablets are part of the Internet’s future – whether you like them or not. Earlier this year, we predicted the rise of mobile web access. That trend wasn’t inevitable then. But the prevalence of Apple’s iPad – the dominant tablet on the market today – confirms what we’ve long argued. Web sites will have to be re-designed to accommodate a constantly mobile lifestyle.

In early 2011, Boucher & Co. began offering mobile web sites as a standard service to accommodate the exponential growth of the mobile web industry. Since then, we’ve also developed every web site to be compatible with all major tablet devices. That’s right – our clients’ web sites render identically (to PCs) on tablet devices. And that’s a huge step forward.

Sometimes it’s good to offer a separate “mobile version” of a web site specifically for phone or tablet devices. After all, information should be easily accessible while on-the-go. That’s why we offer clients the option of creating a separate “mobile web site.”  But gone are the days when separate was the only option for those wishing to offer their customers access on-the-go.

No matter how you and your employees feel about tablet devices, you can’t dispute the evidence: tablet devices, including the Apple iPad, are taking the business world by storm, and if you don’t act now, your business could fall behind a dangerous technological curve. Embrace the tablet.