Flash Must Go …

I like to eat. Actually, I really like to eat. It’s not unusual at all for me to get hungry and want something “really good” and turn to my mobile phone to find it. Food aficionados with iPhones can turn to any number of apps – including Urban Spoon which allows people to find nearby restaurants with a shake of the iPhone. Though not as novel, Blackberrys now have the where.com app which provides restaurant recommendations based on yelp.com reviews. For me, how I find the restaurant isn’t all that important. What’s important is the restaurant’s site — and that’s where the problems come in.

Someone in restaurant world has decided that practically every restaurant site must have either be built in Flash or, at the very least, have a Flash splash page. Here’s the problem. Flash is generally not available on most mobile phones. It is not available on the iPhone, which generates well over half of all mobile phone Internet traffic, or on the Blackberry. The fancy animations that load on restaurant sites cannot be seen by users on the most popular mobile phones and, in fact, cause the site to be totally unusable on those devices. You are losing customers — customers interested enough in visiting your restaurant that they’re looking it up at that very moment on their phone rather than waiting to get back to a computer with a bigger screen. It’s time to have a conversation with your web development company.

Questions to ask:

• Is our site built in Flash? Is the first page only viewable on devices that support Flash? If so, can it be fixed?
• Can we provide mobile visitors with an experience optimized for mobile devices?
• Since we know mobile site visitors are likely to want to visit in the near term, what can we do to entice them?

Getting the most value from your web site demands catering to the needs of your customers. Attending to the mobile site visitor will increase customer satisfaction and get more people into your dining room.

And though this is directed at restaurants, it goes for any site with that uses Flash for core site functionality. If customers can’t use your web site on their phone, they will spend their money elsewhere.

Finally, one caveat. This situation will not last forever. Most phone manufacturers are working with Adobe on the Open Screen Project to ensure that their phones can view Flash on web sites. Unfortunately, Apple and RIM (Blackberry) are not among them.