Mobile phones that can view the Internet are not really anything new. The iPhone 3, the Blackberry, most decent Nokia’s and many other handset manufacturers have built in web browsers and the capability to view web pages. Now the iPhone 4 and the latest version of Android (Googles high speed operating system) do something new – they are fast and therefore very usable! Combine handset speed with Wi-Fi access, 3G/4G networks and bigger screens and suddenly we have a lot of people using mobiles to view the web.

So what do we need to do to our website for these new visitors? For most websites, nothing. Yes you can create a mobile version of your website by making a special style sheet that is designed for smaller screens, however that is going to be fairly expensive to set-up and may not actually be the preferred option. Most mobile phone users that I know prefer to see the same sites that they see on their PC. Zooming and scrolling is so easy on touch screen phones that it is no trouble to view the normal version of your website. There are very few SME owned websites that have a special mobile friendly design, most likely due to the lack of demand for such a facility.

There are some things that you can do to improve the mobile experience. First of all, keep your loading times to a minimum by inspecting the dimensions and file sizes of images. This is a benefit to everyone, so should already be something you are aware of. If you use Adobe Flash then iPhones will not display your animated content, this might be ok if Flash is used for non essential elements but if your whole site or navigation uses it then you will have an issue on these devices. Is your menu system straightforward and ideally located in one area? If not, it might be rather tricky for a user to keep zooming and scrolling looking for links to the next page. Featuring popular pages or sections using graphical links will help everyone and on a smaller screen it really is very handy.

There is a lot of talk about ‘m-commerce’ at the moment but right now it is very early days. Most users will prefer to place orders through a traditional computer where they have their normal security in place and the benefit of a proper keyboard. Mobile phones are a great way to browse and look things up and as long as your website is operational then you will receive mobile visitors too.

Finally the question that most website owners ask – should we have an iPhone/Android app? The whole ‘app’ concept is a great opportunity for some organisations, however unless you actually have something in mind, then there really is no point in investing in building an application just for the sake of it. That’s not really the way to develop software!