Have you viewed your website on an iPhone lately?
Every day people are switching to "smart-phones"; which makes it possible for them to view websites without using their desktop or laptop computers. This is great news if you have a website, but there are a couple things to be aware of, (some good, some bad). There are all new browser issues, and extra features like custom icons! All of the images below expand when clicked to give you a better view.
*Every smart-phone may have it's own issues. The info below is regarding Apple iPhones.
iPhone Browser Issues
Since browsers on iPhones are different than the browsers used on "regular" computers, there are new issues that come up. The two most common problems are basic spacing issues, and the other, most important problem is that iPhones do not support Flash!
Flash animations are used on many websites, but at this time the browsers in iPhones can not display the animations. Instead, you get a "broken lego with questions marks" icon, as seen below. The image below is how the new Sonora DesignWorks website looked before it was fixed to work properly on iPhones. See how the homepage Flash animation is missing, and how our "Featured Websites" slider has spacing issues and is sitting on top of the text instead of in the footer where it should be.
Sonora to the rescue!
The good news is we can help. Having a big blank space on your website is not only unprofessional, but your user is getting none of the important information that is in your animation. The solution is to give the iPhone a completely different section to look at. Keeping in mind that the user is on a smaller browser is important also, as you might want to give them different options than a user on a desktop computer.
For example, look at the images below. This is how the Sonora website looks currently if you pull it up on an iPhone. Instead of using the same text for "web portfolio" and "print portfolio" that are on our regular homepage, we decided to make larger "web portfolio" and "directions" buttons. The thought is that someone looking at our website through an iPhone might be on the way to our shop, and pulling up our website for directions. We wanted to make this process as easy as possible for them; where we would rather have someone on a desktop computer checkout our print portfolio.
Custom iPhone icons
If you have an iPhone you know about the icons used for programs and apps. Did you know that you can bookmark a website and it will be assigned an icon? This gives you or your user one touch access to your website. Wouldn't it be nice if you could control what this icon looked like? Well now you can! We can design a custom iPhone icon to match the branding of your company and website. Check out the example below, where we show how easy it is to add the icon to your homepage, and what a finished icon looks like. Test it for yourself, go to SonoraDesignWorks.com on your iPhone Safari browser and follow the steps below!
Note: At this time, we don't support any mobile device browsers when we develop a website; (due to the variety of browsers on smartphones). To see the browsers we do support, visit our Browser Support page. If you have an existing website that you would like to work on a certain mobile device, or are interested in having us develop your new website to work on a mobile device such as the iPhone, please contact us for more info.
