A while ago, I coded a promotional landing page for Geometry Stash. You can get it here.
I thought about marketing it, not to a pc, but to the user when they were using the iPhone. The obvious choice was Apple’s iAd network which provided pretty much everything an advertiser would need short of the product. I’m still the process of doing such a thing. But why wait?
What is a Web Clip? If you don’t know what one is, you’re the average iPhone user in today’s app bazaar. Web Clips have been around since iPhone OS update 1.1.3 released in 2008. They look like this
(Most Web Clips don’t look as sleek as the one to the left; they look like scrunched up versions of the bookmarked page squeezed into a tiny icon.)
Are you catching on yet? One could create a Web Clip on a device’s home screen in order to promote it.
“But that doesn’t even work or look well. It just launches Safari and then the user needs to wait for the page to load similar to when they load a normal webpage when browsing. It looks so bad, it just like a normal web browsing experience! Users will get turned off the second they click the Web Clip! “
Wait, there’s more to this promotion tactic than meets the eye. Apple has helpfully made web app development resources available on their website. By adding the necessary lines of code to the page’s source, the Web Clip, when clicked, opens up almost like a native app.
Try adding and running the promotion page to your iPhone’s home screen to see for yourself.
Cool, a loading screen!
Most iPhone users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the Web Clip and a weirdly made native app — but hey, there’s plenty of those already in the AppStore, much less what a Web Clip is.
