Going Immobile
I don’t know what website the young lady is viewing on her phone, but it is certainly not the new Delaware.gov website. Yesterday, Delaware unveiled its new website, it has lots of bells and whistles, but the biggest drawback is that is not mobile friendly. In this day and age when so many of us are on the go accessing the internet from our phones, a newly designed government website should be needs to be mobile friendly. And, yes, I know DelawareLiberal is not mobile friendly, though that’s liberalgeek’s fault ;-). Here is a good comparison between Delaware’s site and New Jersey’s mobile site just so you can see the simplicity of a mobile site.
Then, Delaware’s insistence to heavily use Flash on the frontpage, when well over 50% of the mobile web traffic is coming from iPhones, just ranks of short-sightedness. Adding insult to injury, one receives the following error message when accessing the site. Um, the inability to use flash is not “a known iPad bug”. Nice try.
Tags: Delaware, technology
I’m hearing that the website is NOT Flash based, though it acts that way. It is still not mobile-friendly.
I am annoyed by Apple iPhone’s and iPad’s not being Flash compatible. Get on that Steve Jobs.
As for mobile friendly, I actually prefer it to look like a real website. I understand your point about functionality, but I want to use my phone to access the internet, not some mobile version of the internet. I want to see how DL looks to the rest of you when a particular post goes up and I can only view it from my phone.
But hey, to each his own.
Geeks generally agree that Flash needs to die. Steve Jobs is doing the right thing by using his market share to help kill Flash.
It is possible to provide two versions of the website – construct it to look one way on the desktop, but another way on a small screen.
HTML 5 will do everything Flash can do. Jobs is right – Flash is buggy, insecure, and a memory hog. I have had far fewer browser freezes since I installed a Flash blocker.
DD, most mobile websites usually have a toggle for the customer to switch from mobile to desktop.
I agree with anon. Flash is on its deathbed.
If you are unfortunate enough to be using Windows, your machine will run nearly twice as fast if you disable or uninstall all Adobe products. Especially the free Acrobat reader (there are plenty of alternatives).
If you must keep Flash, use a Flash blocker (let it through only if you really really need to see that particular bit of animation).
/begin geek
Hearing from the Systems Admin for the Delaware Library Catalog that the error seen on iPhones and iPads is a known error in iFrames. At this time, I don’t know what the time line is on a fix.
/end geek
Little harsh there and an unfair comparison, maybe. They have a mobile site at mobile.delaware.gov that looks like that NJ site sortof but they don’t force people into it. So, maybe you missed that. I use it on my old cell phone and it works great. I hate sites that force the mobile thing down my throat when I’m on my iPhone. And then I have to dig around to get to the “real” website. OK, they can’t show some stuff for whatever reason in some windows. At least they give a link to the stuff right there! I run into sites all the time where they stick crap in a window and I can’t scroll it. EVEN with two fingers. I hate that. At least they didn’t give me a broken thing and not tell me, which would piss me off big time. Giving me a link to something that works because they know the thing they have doesn’t work right is pretty “mobile friendly” in my opinion even if it doesn’t work 100%. I think it looks great and is a real improvement over the old website. Give them some credit for going in the right direction.