iProduct Statistics and your Business

• September 5, 2007 - Apple released it’s first generation iPod Touch.
• July 11, 2008 - Apple released it’s 3G iPhone.
• April 3, 2010 - Apple launched it’s first generation iPad.

We here at Acorn Internet Services, Inc.  recommend that you provide a Mobile site available for those using either an iPod Touch or iPhone (and many other phones on the market that do not function well when presented with a full desktop site).

These types of custom Mobiles sites are created to be light and quick to load. They do not include rotating images, as that such features degrade their ability to conform to MOBI standards.

But in the case of the iPad, we recommend that your full site be available for view as that the iPad is both large and powerful enough to be used as an alternative to a laptop or desktop for web surfing.

Which brings us to the topic of FLASH on your desktop web site design.

We discontinued the use of FLASH on any of our new site / site lift designs toward the end of 2010. But as many of you know, we’ve been building sites long before the first iPad was released in 2010.

And like all developers during the past decade, we used the current technology provided at that time.

So, if you have an older Web site that still has FLASH imagery, we highly suggest that you consider one of the two solutions we discussed in a previous Blog post back in 2010.

Blog Post Date: November 19, 2010  Click to Read
Educational Bytes .011 – Should you "Trash your Flash"...

a) If you have highly customized Flash rotation, such as flowing words, floating boxes and lines, etc. You might consider a flat image being laid “underneath” your FLASH so that on an iPad, there is a visual for your guest to see and not just blank screen.

b) If you have a fairly simple FLASH rotation, where the images simply float in and out in succession, we suggest you have your Flash converted to a standard CSS/Javascript rotation that works appropriately on all iProducts.

Finally, I took a moment to pull some basic numbers from June 2011. This was when Google Analytics fully began breaking out mobile devices in their tracking tools. I then compared them to January 2012. You can clearly see the increase in Bed and Breakfast surfers using iPads as compared to 7 months ago. And we only expect these numbers to continue growing into the future.

And granted, in the big scheme of things, iPads are a drop in the bucket when it comes to device traffic. But, their usage is growing quite quickly, and need to be taken into consideration for the future, along with Mobile traffic in general.

Here are the steps to check to see if you currently have FLASH on your Web site.

Keep in Mind... If you had Acorn IS build your Web Site after the end of 2010, then FLASH issues should not exist.

a) If you HAVE an iPad, simply test all the pages of your site.
b) If you do NOT have an iPad, you can test to see if you have any .SWF (Flash file extensions) loading on your site.

Step 1: Go to your Web site home page
Step 2: Right Click on either the Left or Right hand side Margin of your site.
Step 3: Click View Page Source
Step 4: From Tool Bar select Edit -- Find and type in .SWF
Step 5: If you find a .SWF file on your home page, you indeed have some type of FLASH file loading.

If you’d like to have us change out your FLASH for something that is visible on any of the iProducts, please contact support@acorn-is.com or call 719-329-0977 x 1 to discuss and request an estimate.

Lisa Kolb
President and Co-Founder
Acorn Internet Services, Inc.
Educating our Industry one Innkeeper at a Time.