Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a ton of reading about the IPad, IPhone, IPod Touch, and all “I” stuff. There’s a lot going on in the “I” world…..
One of the big issues of course is Flash. As you may or may not know, the IPad et all do not run Adobe Flash. That’s a problem. It’s a real problem, especially for photographers racing to pop their portfolios up on Flash based websites. And if you haven’t noticed, everybody is popping their portfolios up on Flash based websites!
What I decided to do recently was pretty straightforward. Take the Flash completely off my main site. Utilize the tools that I love the most. WordPress, NextGen Gallery, and my own customized CSS. The end result?
A new simple clean website that looks and feels like my blogging site. And a site that does not run into Flash issues when displaying on mobile devices. I’ve got to keep my audience in mind, and trends in my own web statistics tell me that 12% of my daily readership uses IPhones to access my site. Some days I see as much as 20% of my traffic here on the blog from IPhones and IPod Touches. I haven’t seen an IPad in the stats yet, but I’m sure that’s just a matter of time.
So, rather than duplicating effort, creating Flash based presentations and alternate mobile setups the final decision was a pretty easy one. I’m a one man show after all, and only have so much time available.
Of course, I’ll keep looking for better ways to present my portfolio, but for the time being I think NextGen Gallery really does a great job! Let me know what you think of the overhaul to the main site!
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Mike, I knew the first comment I’d have on this one would be you. Yup, some things to work on. Sizing for the web and the I devices isn’t quite done yet. Oddly enough, on the Touch I don’t have a problem with the navigation, but I’ll work on that too.
Still, I’m happy it’s I friendlier. More work will come in between the rest of what I’m working on. 🙂
Rich,
You must know that there are several problems with the implementation of richcharpentier.com on the iDevices. The photo display bleeds off to the right hand side and does not stay within the page width you set in the title. The navigation controls are almost invisible as are the thumbnails and text all on the black background.
Also, the basic navigation just below the title and subtitle is small and difficult to touch accurately. Having the page navigation on two lines conveys the idea (erroneously) that say “About Rich Workshops” is one linked page rather than two. Lastly, the “Portfolio” drop-down subpage links overlay on the text around the images. Looks like a mistake but I think you could just add more white space between the nav and the photo gallery and other text that shows below it.
Hope this helps a bit. Yes, I’ve looked at this on my iPad so chalk me up as one iPad viewer.
Here is a thought, you can cheat with WordPress and install a widget called iTheme! It will reformat the site automatically for iDevices!
As a Flash hater, I totally agree with Apple banning it from the iStuff. I block flash on my computers.
Good idea to remove it from your site!
Great post! I never thought to look at my site on the iPhone. D’oh! It looks pretty good (I never had Flash to begin with) but one of the thumbnail photos doesn’t load, so that was interesting to find out. Thanks.
I went through the same cleansing activity with my own site redevelopment recently, which was big job as most of it was flash. I ran my portfolios from SlideShowPro Witt their director at the backend. It was a real Shane having to give this combo up.
I saw on their site though that they are about to launch a HTML5 solution that will work for devices that do not have flash. Demo Video looks pretty sweet.