The question is no longer for geek designers only. Since the iPad launch webdesign fundamentals had to take into consideration the new platform. Now that iPad’s second year birthday is here (it was announced on January 27, 2010, by Steve Jobs at an Apple press conference at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco), it’s probably time to open a more general discussion: how tablets affected the way we design websites?

Gordon Mclachlan wrote on October 2011 an interesting article making some points and questions we try to answer here: 

For the web professional though, the inevitable rise of the tablet is going to raise a lot of questions and potentially challenge the way we all design and develop. Will Flash make a come back if the iPad’s popularity dips?

No way. Even Adobe turned it off from mobile…

 Will the new iOS 5 reader feature in Safari kill off online advertising?

Mhhmmm, don’t seem so, but hey.. maybe in the future…

Will Silk, the new Kindle Fire browser, be standards compliant and will its cloud acceleration cause problems and privacy issues?

Too early to say

And, on a much larger and general scale, how will the increasing use of tablet computing affect the way we design and build sites and online apps as a whole?

Here you go. 

People actually expect to be able to fully and properly use any web site on a tablet, shopping, banking and browsing as they please and as mobile and tablet Internet viewing increases, it’s going to become more and more important to consider when designing and building an online platform.

To tell you the truth we already knew all that. So what? Zdnet, the popular news site, explains its opinion in Tablet-optimized sites boost reach, experience. While many bloggers and designers try to figure out new standards. And you, what do you think? How do tablets affect the way websites are designed? And seriously, while thinking, check out these three websites: