As an avid cyclist, I, along with many of my weight weenie friends, can tell you that I do just about anything to shed a few grams from my bike. That’s right, a few grams. I replace the tiny bolts that hold my water bottle cage with special light titanium bolts. I buy a seat that is as hard as a rock and makes my junk go numb on any ride over 20 miles because it only weighs 130grams. I purchase a seatpost clamp for $80 because it was 10grams lighter than my original seatpost clamp. Yeah, that is $80 for that tiny piece of now carbon material that tightens the seatpost to the frame. For me, and millions of other cyclists out there, upgrading my bike is an addiction.

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After reading our first article, I am sure you asked yourself, as many other companies are, “Are my customers iPhone users?”. So we thought we would touch upon this question and how the news of the future of the iPhone, from Steve Jobs presentation last week which covers Apple’s plans for the iPhone 2.0, may also effect whether you will see iPhone (iPod Touch) website traffic.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

During Apple’s presentation last week Steve Jobs as well as Phil Schiller (Senior VP, Worldwide Product Marketing) and Scott Forstall (VP, iPhone) spelled out what Apple’s plans are for the iPhone. Some of the most notable topics of the presentation in regards to the question we are covering today is that Apple has quickly achieved 28% of the U.S. Smartphone Market share. Second only to longtime player RIM’s with their 41%. Equally surprising is Mobile Safari’s (the internet browser on the iPhone and iPod Touch) number one spot for U.S. Mobile Browser Usage, with a whopping 71%. Second place goes to Microsoft trailing far behind with 12%. Daniel Eran Dilger points out, these are impressive numbers when you consider that the iPhone has only been available since June, 2007, and that in the U.S. the iPhone is only available to AT&T customers.

SUITS CAN PLAY TOO

After covering where the iPhone has been in the consumer market, Phil Schiller (Senior VP, Worldwide Product Marketing) announced the iPhone Enterprise Beta Program. This program allows IT departments and large companies to test the iPhone’s new features, which will be released soon in version 2.0 in enterprise environments. This means iPhone fun for large companies. In regards to the question “Are my customers iPhones users?”, more iPhone users could be visiting your company website. The beta program has already been in place at companies such as Disney, Nike, Stanford University, and Genentech.

“Apple has really done their homework, addressing issues of security, manageability, and integration. We currently have hundreds of iPhone users and expect the demand to grow significantly with this release.” Senior VP of IT at Disney.

GAMES, ORGANIZERS, & HOROSCOPES

Most of the buzz leading up to the presentation was in regards to the release of the Software Developers Kit. This will allow third parties to build applications specifically for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Companies have already been hinting at soon to be released third party applications. This could sweeten the pot for more growth for the iPhone.

STEVE SAYS NO TO FLASH

On Tuesday, days before the presentation Steve Jobs also set the story straight on the Flash Player rumors coming to the iPhone. Jobs stated that Adobe needed to make something better than the current Flash Player made for mobile phones, and the larger desktop Flash Player was to slow on the iPhone. (Article not available, see cache version here)

“There’s this missing product in the middle,” Jobs said.

This means that if you have flash on your current site your visitors will not be able to see those portions on the website.

WHERE DO WE GO

So by now as many other companies are (Land Rover) you could be saying “We need to accommodate these new iPhone visitors”, what now? A great place to start would be to read our first post “How Your Website Will Look on the iPhone and iPod Touch”. Still have more questions? Well, post a comment, send an email, or call. We don’t bite.

So, your advertising agency or in-house marketing team presents you with a stellar, on the mark design for your new website. You’re very excited and tell them to move forward and make it live asap. But wait! You may be missing something…or someone, like a huge chunk of your target audience. What am I talking about? Your new best friend, Web Standards.

Let me introduce you to Web Standards. Web Standards, of course, has a formal definition which we’ll introduce later. First let me start by explaining to you what Web Standards means to you, and more importantly, your consumer. Using web standards means that everyone (the important part of “everyone” is your target market, of course) can see your gorgeous site just the way that you see it (no matter what browser or electronic web viewing device they’re using). It also means that your target audience can view your website just as fast and find it just as easily as you can. Does this Web Standards stuff sound important now? If so, read on.

There are countless ways to develop the back-end of a website, and with so many different options what makes one programming technique better than the next? In this blog I will try to explain the advantages of having your website designed and developed using current Web Standards and how that will help your site stand apart from that of your competitors. Okay, now for the techy stuff (Warning: In order to prevent your eyes from glossing over, you may want to pass off the remainder of this post to your trusted web programmer).

What are Web Standards?

Web Standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building websites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

As the World Wide Web has evolved, there have been different browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera and Safari, to name of few of the most popular) with different specifications and no standardized set of rules for design. This led to an increasing number of sites with code that was virtually impossible for the browsers to pick through for search result ranking purposes. As more and more sites were being developed with inconsistent and unorganized code, a grass-roots movement was started to develop standards for the web. Hello Web Standards! This movement created The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C, along with other groups and standards bodies, dedicated themselves to developing such Web Standards because this is what our brand new friend Web Standards does, ”…simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.” – Web Standards Group. Don’t you agree that we should all have a friend like him?

“Go W3C and Web Standards!”, right? Wrong! There’s one small problem…Because the Web Standards movement was driven by primarily the freelancer, small businesses and institutions, many large web development companies do not promote or advertise their use of Web Standards. Unfortunately, this lack of big business support has slowed the growth of Web Standards and thus slowed the process of this information trickling down to the common website consumer.

Here at {e} house, we are strong supporters of the Web Standards movement. And we are doing our best to inform the consumer of these standards in order to make their site as functional (for the widest audience) as possible. Here’s a detailed list of what Web Standards has to offer: (Again, beware of techy jargon overload!)

The Benefits

• Less Bandwidth Intense:
  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has allowed website designers and developers to streamline the process of writing web programming code. By building your site using CSS, you are able to significantly reduce the size and load time of your site. This will greatly increase the performance of large sites. Even smaller sites will benefit, as pages will load much faster for users. The reason that CSS layouts load quicker than non-CSS pages is because once the CSS file has been cached, all of the page styles and images have been loaded. Each page after the initial load will only need to load that page’s unique content.

• Extensibility:
  There is a CSS reference site that is a perfect example of what well planned CSS is capable of. CSSZenGarden demonstrates that it is possible to change the look and feel of a website completely without touching the code that builds the site and only editing the CSS page.

• Ease of Maintenance:
  Because websites do require change and maintenance, CSS standards driven sites make it very easy for any developer to get into and make changes. It used to be that sites were built with nested tables and inline styles that made it nearly impossible to read. If the site was new to the person making the changes, they were up for a huge challenge. Now, a well documented CSS layout is easy for a developer that is new to the site to jump in and make the changes. This definitely means a smaller maintenance and changes bill for the owner of the site.

• Compatibility (with newer browsers and mobile devices)
  This is something we call forward compatibility. This means that any website that is designed and built the correct way can be viewed correctly on multiple browsers, platforms, and internet devices. The beauty of standards is that a site built using them will continue to work on different browsers even as current browsers evolve and new browsers are introduced.

• Accessibility:
  Valid code does not necessarily mean that your website will be completely accessible for the disabled, but many feel it’s a good place to start.

Phew! If you were able to get through that list, you are probably ready to write Web Standards into your will…. Now I have a little wrench to throw into your plans. It’s Web Standard’s enemy, Flash. As you have probably noticed, Flash is an extremely common element used in many websites. But Flash is not Web Standards compliant. The idea of using a plug-in on your Internet browser to view content on a website is against Web Standards. Does that mean that you should never use Flash? Probably not. We often use Flash elements in our client sites and even our own. The key is knowing how Flash will display in different browsers and how to address browsers that don’t support Flash (such as Safari Mobile).

Our Suggestions

So, here’s our suggestion to you. Embrace Web Standards as your friend and be sure to introduce him to your favorite web designer (If your pick web designer is {e}, you won’t have to). As Jeffrey Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog Studios, said “Standards are vital to any medium. Because the software through which the web is viewed finally supports standards, it makes sense to learn and correctly use them. Doing so saves time and money, reduces overhead, extends the usable life of our sites, and provides greater access to our content.” That sounds like something we can all relate to.

The Mobile Internet has been estimated at over 34.6 million users back in June of 2006 according to the “U.S. Device Census Report for Q2 2006″. Apple expects to add 10 million iPhone users by the end of 2008 and experts estimate another 8.5 million iPod Touch device users, which also support mobile browsing via WiFi. Combined, these three user numbers equal twice the population of New York City. With an audience this size your website can surely expect iPhone/iPod Touch visitor traffic. Our focus today is to explain to you, who may not build websites for a living, what you need to know about your company’s website and how it will function on these Mobile Internet devices.

What Is Mobile Marketing Anyway?

Mobile Marketing has been all the buzz over the last year and it is no wonder why with, “more than 3 billion mobile phones in a world of 6 billion people. That’s 2.5 times more cell phones than Internet connections” says Adverting Age’s Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) 2007 Mobile Marketing Guide. For those of you who are new to Mobile Marketing, the MMA defines Mobile Marketing as, “the use of wireless media (primarily cellular phones and PDAs) as an integrated content delivery and direct-response vehicle within a cross-media marketing communications program. Mobile Marketing can be a marketing use of voice messages, text messaging (SMS), video messaging (MMS), live video and television delivered to a mobile device; downloadable products (games, videos, podcasts, ringtones, wallpapers) and the Mobile Web, including WAP sites.”

Enter The iPhone & iPod Touch

You may already know that Apple’s iPhone is changing the mobile devise market, but you might not know it is also changing the Mobile Web as well. In the past, the Mobile Internet has been made up of mobile sites specifically built for mobile phone browsers using technologies such as WAP. Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch have changed this by creating the most computer-like mobile browser to date, called Mobile Safari. I am sure you have seen the TV commercial where we are told that the Internet experience on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is the same as you would expect from your computer. This is true to a certain extent.

Although Mobile Safari does display websites adhering to web standards very similar to your computer, the one major difference with Mobile Safari is the lack of support for Adobe Flash Player. Mobile Safari will not support any Flash content on your website. There are many speculations as to why this is the case (such as battery life) and some people believe that Apple is in no rush to support the Flash Player. The bottom line is that if your website is made up of Flash, the Flash portions of your site will not display on the iPhone and iPod Touch. As you can imagine, this could be a real problem for many companies and their websites. Other plug-ins such as Quicktime, a multimedia platform, have been updated but still work differently on these devices. Below are a few items to consider when evaluating your website.

Things To Know

1. Flash is not supported and will not display on the iPhone and iPod Touch. So websites using Flash to present information or navigation will not work properly.
2. Because these devices use Wi-Fi and/or Cingular’s Edge Network, download times will be much slower. This means that if your website is slow to load due to messy code and lots of images, users will have an even longer wait-time to see your site.
3. The screen on the iPhone and iPod Touch is much smaller than an average computer screen, so anything under 320px will be shrunken to fit the display by zooming out. This means that some things maybe too small to read or require the user to scroll to see everything.
4. The browser on these devices has a limited RAM (Random Access Memory), therefore webpage content should be under 30MB total.
5. These devices have no mouse! The mouse is replaced by the user’s finger. Consequently, if buttons or links are to small to click, the user will have trouble navigating the site.

Where Do We Go From Here

If we haven’t lost you by now, many of you might be asking well what now? Here are three strategies for going forward.

1. Do nothing. You my think that iPhone and iPod Touch users are not your target audience. This may be true now. But when you consider the impact the iPod had on the MP3 market, you could make a good argument that Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch could be setting the standards for the Mobile Web going forward. So your visitors might not be using these devices now, but they probably will be in the near future.
2. If your website is already close to working on these devices, you can optimize your current site as best as possible. This strategy would be for a website that might already be close to web standards or has minimal Flash. One option would be to remove the Flash portions of the site altogether. If this will not work for your particular website, another option would be to include both Flash and non-Flash elements in the programming. This means that the site is programmed so that if the website is viewed on a regular computer, the Flash portions will be present. If viewed on an iPhone or iPod Touch the Flash portions will be replaced with static images or other supported content. Our current {e} site would be an example of this strategy.
3. The last option would be to create a separate site specific to these devises only. Examples of this would be www.airtran.com. On a normal browser the site looks like most see it, but if you visit the site on a iPhone or iPod Touch you will see a mini-site designed to make navigating the website easy and with only minimal features that are the most important.

Help

If you are on a Mac (sorry PC People) and don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch and you want to test your site’s capability on these devices, take a look at iPhoney. For the rest of our readers, please feel free to post a comment below or send us an email and we will try to answer any questions you may have about your current site or future website plans in regards to capability with the iPhone or iPod Touch…or any other questions for that matter (just a little plug).

Update

Read part two of our iPhone and iPod Touch series. Are my customers iPhone users?

Adobe making a mess for them selves by now announcing that they cannot use the SDK to get flash on the iPhone. Not great on Adobes part, it’s never a good idea to over promise and under deliver.

Looks as if Adobe is set on getting some form of the Flash Player on the iPhone whether Apple cooperates/helps or not.

There has recently been much talk regarding Flash coming to the iPhone. Steve Jobs announced that anyone waiting for Flash may be left waiting. Steve Jobs dismisses Flash for iPhone