How To Make Your Website an iPhone App

Hey y’all -

I just got a great question from Michael over email:

Good Morning Jen,

Quick question… What would it take to make an iPhone app that just points to a website. Our site is iPhone optomized and is a non profit hobby fansite for an ABC television show and as we’d love to offer a free app to our visitors that sort of gives them one touch access to our iPhone version of the site. How could something like this be done?

Cheers,
Michael

Great question Michael – having a mobile-optimized site is great, but what if people are looking for your content via the App Store? How do they find you there? They don’t! The only way for this to happen is if you package up your website within an actual iPhone application.

Beyond findability of your content, having a native iPhone application for your content allows users more ways to interact with your content and faster load times. The way this is done is by creating a “hybrid” app. You build a native iPhone app shell that loads in your web content and you’re all set to go!

Beyond just loading in web content, if you’re going to go through the process of creating an app, think about other ways people might want to share, save, favorite, discuss your content. Make it a two-way dialog with your users and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Hope this helps! jen