Thanks to popular new inventions like Apple's IPhone, you can be sure that soon a good percentage of your visitors will be coming to you via mobile sources. However, trying to view a Web site designed for a high resolution PC display is very difficult on a tiny cellphone or PDA screen.

The fonts are usually unreadably small, and the viewer has to scroll the screen in all three directions to find what they are looking for.

The major search engines are now
singling out mobile friendly Web Sites.

Also, since phones and PDAs have slower data speeds, a graphically intensive site may takemore than a minute to load, which most people will not wait for. Because of these considerations, to save the viewer time and frustration, the major search engines are now singling out mobile friendly Web Sites, so that when someone searches on a phone using Google, your site might not even appear.

There are a couple of things you can do to prepare for the new generation of the browsing public, but they may be costly and time consuming.

Depending on the complexity and coding of your current site, you could create a second mobile friendly version, and store it within a folder on your current site. Once it is there, you would need your designer to create a system to detect if the visitor is viewing with a normal PC or a mobile browser.

If the visitor is on a mobile system, they could then be directed to the mobile-compatible version of the site.

The second option is to have a whole new seperate mobile friendly site created, and hosted under a new .mobi domain name.

Of the two, the second choice would probably be the more efficient, as the searches should treat your site more seriously because of the .mobi domain.

If your site is a content-managed site (one you can update yourself) like our WebUpdate range, your developer should be able to recode it to detect the visitor's browser, and display the content under a more compact template.

Because we believe that this is a crucial consideration if our clients' sites are to be successful, our new WebUpdate4 sites have such detection and alternate content display built in as standard.

Also, with our included visitor tracking system, clients can immediately see how many of their visitors are viewing the mobile content.

If your site isn't ready for the next generation, call us or visit http://www.internetmark.com to read about our clients, and see first-hand the remarkable results we bring to their businesses.

Remember, on the Internet, a Web Site is only the beginning.

Terry Young is the founder and CEO of Internet Marketing and Design. Since 1997,
his computer programming and graphic design knowledge have kept his company
at the forefront of the latest technology in web development.