The iPhenomenon isn't going away. Having a strong contingent of hard core Linux users as my main group of friends makes it dangerous for me to have made that statement. Oh, how they hate that little once rainbow-happy apple. I hear the complaints all the time. "The products are flawed, they're made for people who don't understand how they work, they're 3 times as expensive as they need to be...insert generic computer nerd comment here." And yet, they remain popular, while most of the people reading this are still trying to figure out what the heck LINUX is.
Schools are buying up and dealing out iPads instead of textbooks. 1.5 million new generation iPhones were sold on the first day. All of this despite the fact that users are locked in to AT&T's spotty service (coverage which, if you believe their commercials, is generated by giant orange satin sheets reaching across America, coincidentally somewhat explaining why their service is so unreliable. If you want better coverage, install taller towers. Sheets do not disperse this coverage very well.). And while Mac phones only accounted for 22% of the second financial quarter market share (BlackBerry had 28% and Android had a whopping 33%), according to the NPD Group, if your target market is people who are under the age of 35, this 22% is very important to you. So important, in fact, that you might need to redesign your website.
Why? Because, as my Linux friends would say, "Steve Jobs hates Flash."
You know that really cool rotating montage of pretty property pictures that you have on your website? Or that neat little animated map of all the local stores in the area? Or the video tour of your property that automatically starts when someone clicks on to your homepage? Those page enhancements are made with flash programming, and they don't show up on mobile devices. iPad users won't be able to see your webpage for the same reason that they can't watch video content from Hulu through their browser and have to download an app to view it - these platforms weren't made to support flash. In all fairness, it's not just Steve Jobs who is the forcing hand in website redevelopment - It's HTML5, who is slowly phasing out the use of flash plug ins on browsers. But it's more fun to blame Steve Jobs because it gets the Mac Fanboys all in a frenzy.
How do you make sure that your website is ready to be viewed on a mobile device? Simple. Try viewing it on one. If you've got service and the site doesn't come up, you have some retooling to do. One of the easiest ways to overcome this issue, if you're not ready to do a whole web-redesign, is to make a mobile version of your website using W3C standard web technologies (such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript) rather than plug ins. On the whole, it's much simpler than redoing your entire site, and best of all, it lets you experiment with the effect that integrating a touch type interface can have on the way that people interact with you online. Touch is a sense that has a high impact on the buying process in the human psyche, so if you can find unique and interesting ways for people to interact with your apartments online, via touch, all the better for your rental numbers!
