iPhones and websites

[Kraftsims]

I am going to start a website in the next twelve months when I'm ready to formally open for business. I'm starting to peruse many sites.

Mostly use my iPhone as I'm on the move constantly. I am a bit surprised at the number of sites that don't function on iPhones for known reasons.

Question one: I'm puzzled as to why a fair number of sites are built that exclude iPhone users. Any insight into why someone would intentionally choose to do so is appreciated. I figure there must be some reason. Cost maybe? Ease to build and maintain? My market is the DFW metro area and iPhone users are everywhere.

Question two: mobile options on websites. I can't claim to be a fan of mobile options so far. Seems menu driven, stark in appearance, doesnt have a photography feel as much as a forum type feel. About half won't load pictures for some reason. I read on here about this graphic or that picture, but it doesn't appear on my phone. I'm puzzled as to why mobile sites are hit or miss loading pics.

So I guess I'm wanting to better understand the thought process behind a photographer who is serving a major metro with 3G and wifi becoming increasingly common + iPhone users, as to what the rationale is for choosing to exclude a fair number of customers.

Thanks

[KenJulio]

Question 1 - With Flash being a standard and having some piece of mind in regards to image security and the lack of flash support on the iphone is the reason why you didnt see a lot of sites being able to be viewed on a smartphone. I know this year for instance, Smugmug had introduced HTML5 with their slideshow, so if you connect to their site via a mobile device, the slideshow will work, if from a PC, you'll get the flash slideshow.

Also, I dont expect to see a lot of connections from mobile devices until this year given the introduction of tablets.

Just my .02

[Steelsun]

I'm also an iPhone user and use it to go to the web ALOT for both by jobs (investigator/consultant and photography).

The 2 biggest problems with viewing the web on an iphone (or other mobile devices) are: Flash & Screen Real Estate.

Yes Flash does offer some security for images, but at a trade off of excluding a increasingly larger set of the browser set (like mobile & some corporations), and has alot of security issues for malware/viruses.
With Screen Real Estate there is little you can do unless you go for a minimalism aspect.

All you can really do when building a site is avoid overly busy real estate and avoid flash. That's what I have started doing in my redesigns.
I just redid Steel-sun.com and one of my main goals was to make it viewable on an iPhone and to have the Galleries viewable.

[Flea77]

This is one of those things that has always confused me too. The last report I read (mid 2010) said there were approximately 100 million iPhone and iPod Touch users in the world. Then you add in approximately 10 million iPads sold this year and you come to a total of 110 million users.

Now some people believe that not playing flash is just an Apple thing, they don't realize that up until recently, Blackberry devices could not play flash either.

Now you add in Android users. There are many major problems with Flash on the Android platforms, primarily with video but other issues are still there. Flash was just not intended for the mobile market and while Adobe is scrambling to get it there, alternatives are already in place that work, and work well.

With all that being said, why anyone would intentionally have a website that completely excludes the 110 MILLION potential customers surfing on iOs devices, partially excludes some of the 41 MILLION Blackberry users and can cause headaches for some of the Android users is beyond my comprehension where alternatives exist.

Just in the past year I have developed many websites with Javascript and Php code that replace Flash functionality and work great on mobile devices. In addition I developed a commercial video delivery website which works fantastic on iOs devices delivering HTML5 MP4 video streams with fallback to Flash MP4 streams for older browsers and devices.

Personally, I like it when my competitors have Flash websites, that leaves more customers for me!

Allan