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Analysis / Marketing / mobile / Web Development — No Comments
10
Jul 12

United Airlines’ adventures in mobile web

I occasionally use Kayak’s rather good app for the iPhone to check airfares for actual and fantasy travel. Recently, all referrals to United Airlines tickets originating from the Kayak app end up in the United’s mobile web site. All data about the ticket search from Kayak is gone in the process. Bummer but it’s not my money to lose.

What I noticed is that United appears to bring you to a mobile ‘text’ website, as shown below:

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It looks like a generic mobile website but intrigues you with a link to the ‘smartphone version’. When you click the link the page transforms itself to…

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…the exact same thing.
Great job, guys.

General / Marketing / mobile / Web Development — No Comments
18
Apr 12

Is nothing really that much worse than something?

How much is a brand worth to a company? For most small companies it means virtually everything. They are one and all with the brand. Bigger companies often pour massive amounts into building and maintaining brands. According to David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, such brand positioning makes or breaks the brand. Something breaks, though, when it comes to mobile. 

Companies and organizations that make such huge investments in their brand suddenly realize their website, often times their core offering, looks bad or does not work on mobile devices. In a world where budgets are almost always tight, they look to do something out of nothing to address this problem. They want to be available to the growing smartphones and tablet-using masses. They need something. 

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Computing / General / Web Development — 1 Comment
08
Nov 11

Flash vs. HTML5: When clients ask you to take sides in a holy war

Recently, a client asked me and my colleagues for a point of view on whether they should develop a profoundly animated website in Flash or go with HTML5. I love HTML5. I worked in Flash in the bad old days and was not a fan. I love HTML5. I even have the sticker on my laptop.

This is naturally prep for a big but.
It comes in the form of the list we shared with our client.
Look at it as a conversation starter. Be nice.

 

  • SEO – Flash and HTML5 are both not ideal for SEO (Canvas and SVG are not textual and hence indexable) 
  • Performance depends on what we need to achieve; complex HTML5 is as slow as complex Flash
  • Creative Liberty – Flash can accomplish more, in less time than HTML5
  • Build time – Flash development, on more browsers, will require less time *for the same thing* – assuming a lot of animation and interactivity
  • Browser Compatibility – HTML5 pretty much cannot work on browsers older than 2 years; Flash still works on the older Internet Explorer browsers that too many people still use. And we have to care about them.

This list is VERY MUCH for the present time. Things change fast and HTML5 is gaining a foothold faster than Flash is losing it. 

Still, right now, it's what I believe. Flash had to be the way to go. Sounds apologetic, no?

OH – and we ARE building an HTML5 mobile + tablet version of the same site. Mobile web vs. native apps – now that's a holy war I do take sides on.