Tonight I was looking at Google analytics for a client’s site and something jumped off the page in a big way. One of our client’s has consistently averaged around 12% of their traffic from iphone visitors. This is a high traffic site (for a small business) and they target mostly consumers and luckily we built their site without any Flash. Why does that matter? Adobe Flash, which is used to deliver 90% of the videos on the web (and other site content as well), doesn’t work on an iPhone.

Seeing this number I decided to do a random sampling of four other clients accounts and they had 1.25%, 1.5%, 4.4%, 11% of their traffic from iPhone visitors. Some of these sites have a large of amount of visitors from iPhones.

What does this mean to you as a business owner with a website?

• If you are using Flash on your site, find a way to make it work without it. ‘Degrade’ your site gracefully so iPhone (and now iPad) users don’t experience a big blank spot or are unable to use or navigate.
• Another option is to create a mobile version of your site so it works well (and more quickly) on mobile devices.
• If you are in the middle of designing or building a website, look at your audience and decide how many of them are likely to use your site from an iPhone, iPad or similar device. If the number is significant – avoid using Flash or make sure you have an alternative – your users will thank you and the numbers of iPhone and iPad users are growing.

Note: Since this site primarily is targeted to a marketing audience, I’m intentionally not getting into the HTML5 versus Flash debate. If you want to do that, feel free to post a comment below or via a reply to me on twitter.