Is your company site mobile? Can users easily navigate, view and source information? These are important questions as Mobile internet devices (smartphones) are currently one of the fastest ways of getting your business in front of potential customers. The convenience of accessing the internet through mobile devices will see more search traffic and surfing online coming from smartphones. Taking this into account if your site isn’t mobile ready then fortunately, it’s not difficult to prepare your business and your site.

First and fore-most is test your company site using a smartphone to understand and identify any issues and also to understand how user friendly the site in through a mobile device. If your existing website has been created in accordance with today’s current web standards, it’s more than likely that establishing a mobile presence to complement it isn’t going to be too difficult.

When we mention best practice and web standards, we are talking about adhering to a series of commonly accepted practices in web design, established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards outline the correct way to use semantic HTML, and encourage things like the use of JavaScript for web animation and interactivity.

Not all digital supplies adhere or test against these standards as part of their development lifecycle. By not apply these standards your site can have a negative impact in visual appearance and user experience.

If a site has been created using the web standards from the W3C, it can be as simple as swapping out a few pieces of code and creating some exceptions so that it loads the same content differently depending on what device tries to access it. It's quite an easy procedure to do, provided the website has been planned that way from the beginning.

There are three basic approaches that business owners should be aware of when working with web developers. The first, is insisting that your site is built in HTML 4 or HTML 5, the site is tested across all platforms and adheres to W3C standards, and to encourage the appropriate use of JavaScript for animation and interactivity.

Many popular content management systems (CMS) actually feature modules or themes that allow the operators to create a mobile version of the site simply and easily.

A more complicated method of ensuring a site is mobile-friendly is to employ adaptive design. This means that all the pages on a business’s original website are coded to deliver different styles to different devices, so that the look and feel adapts to suit the visitor’s browser.

The most important thing to consider when creating a mobile site is speed: how quickly it downloads, how quickly it displays, and how quickly users can find what they’re after.

One of the big issues for mobile is that users are quite impatient, when on the mobile phone, if it hasn't happened within 10 seconds, the user will assume that there's something wrong and could go on to something else. Taking this into account we recommend businesses should always have the user in mind when considering how much information and how should it be presented on a mobile site.

This means making sure the active areas are easily distinguishable, it's easy to navigate, and that users don't have to scroll around too much to read or find the information they want.

Quite apart from the technical aspect of building a mobile site, it’s essential for businesses to use analytics to learn as much as possible about site visitors, and tailor mobile content to them. A retail site might have a very iPhone-heavy audience; a corporate site might tend towards Blackberries.

If you're business invests in email marketing, your audience will be more than likely to be looking at your emails on their phone, and looking at your site that way. “It's worth making sure that the landing page for your marketing campaign is going to be mobile friendly.”

It’s also wise to take advantage of the fact that mobile analytics allow businesses to be more aware of the visitor’s context. As a business owner this is not a daunting task, by simply contacting your digital firm they can help you go mobile!