Wow, this whole mobile web surfing craze has surpassed everyone's expectations. Even the mobile developers have fallen behind on offering solutions to problems that are arising from the shift to tablets and smarter all the time phones.
I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas, and I love it, being an avid reader, and I can web surf on it too, so I decided to take a look at my sites and see how they looked on it. Much to my shock and dismay, I found that none of my audio players and slide shows showed up.
I am an Amazon Affiliate, and I use Amazon widgets all the time to offer collections of books and other items on my sites. They have great scrolling slide shows, carousels that rotate and all kinds of eye-catching fun ways to share their products with potential customers. Guess what, none of those work on mobile. So, now hundreds of hours I spent creating them, selecting the books, etc. cannot be seen by the vast numbers of mobile phone users. Eeeek.
The problem was that Flash was used for all the slide shows and moving items, and Flash is not mobile friendly. In other words, it does not work. When you have a slide show on your site, and look at it from a mobile device, it's just a big white gap.
I searched the web to see if I could find an alternative that does work on mobile, and there really is not one at this time. We all know that Flash support has been discontinued now. Now users are pushing the technology as much as techies are pushing us to learn new things. So, back to the problems at hand. Here are some of my workarounds until new technology arrives.
Amazon product links:
Amazon now offers an image only link to products, and a bit of html code placed on the page shows a scroll-over drop down telling you it's an Amazon link and details of the product. However, the touch screen technology does not allow that to work on mobile either, but you can use the photos with their auto links. They work and look great. For the carousels and slide shows I wanted to keep, I just moved them to the bottom of the page, and above them put links back to the author's list of books. That way, mobile viewers won't know anything is missing because they won't see a blank space in an odd location, and they can view the same content by clicking the link. And, just so you know, those Amazon linked items will not show up on search engines, so you need to include a little bit of text identifying the item in order for it to be searchable.
YouTube Videos:
If your site offers YouTube videos, and you used a widget to link to that video (like on blogger), it won't show up on mobile. You can go to YouTube and click share below the video, there is a choice for embed code. Choose the size of the video you want to display (smaller is better for mobile browsing), copy the code and paste it into an html box on your site or blog. Then your video will show up on mobile and PCs.
Audio Players:
Many audio players offered on blogs and websites will not work on mobile. There is code that will fix the problem, but it has some glitches, and is complicated, so I won't share it. Yola's help desk gave me some code, and I chose everything correctly, and the audio works fine on mobile now, but the Firefox Browser now drops it out and just shows a white box, and Google auto plays the audio when you hit the page, even though the code is set not to auto play. If you have several audio files on one page, they all start playing at once, it's not a good thing. So, for now, I recommend you just put a note saying that the audio files are not yet available for mobile. Or, you can upload your audio files to I-tunes or similar.
It's a lot of work to make these changes, but if you want to offer full access to the millions of mobile users, it's really a must. And, if you just wait for a while, these glitches and bugs will get solved, but who knows how long that will take.Don't be discouraged. This gives us a bigger market to sell to. Keep writing and marketing, and if you have any specific questions, drop me a note from http://writingmuse.com
Yola offers automatic translation for mobile devices and great easy to use sitebuilder tools:
