There is a billboard along the highway on my morning commute to the office with a URL promoting a new web business. A couple days ago, I was stopped in traffic and tried the URL on my iPhone and got a blank screen with a “install a flash player” message.

I’ve seen this same billboard in two spots near my house. I’m not up on my current billboard ad rates in St. Charles and St. Louis County, but advertising a URL on a billboard and that not showing the website to the user is a HUGE WASTE OF MONEY. As of this month, Apple has sold 222 million iOS devices¹ and none of them run flash. This site won’t work on the largest mobile browser by marketshare (37%+ of the mobile browser market²⁾.

I know the likely readers of this post will already know this, but if you are an advertising or marketing decision maker and are promoting your site on outdoor advertising make sure you have a mobile version of your site ready to go. Otherwise you are wasting your money.

1. http://allthingsd.com/20110720/apples-sold-222-million-ios-devices-so-far/
2. http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/06/mobile_browser_9.html

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.