Is your site missing out on potential eyeballs, just because they’re accessing it using a mobile device? Native interface elements that feel familiar to handheld device users can easily be implemented by combining two standards-compliant techniques and directing your visitors to a specially formatted version of your site or blog.

As long as 10 years ago, web standards champions the W3C afforded the web designer a way to optimise their layouts for handheld devices, however the methodology was little known and was implemented even less-so.

The advent of touch screen devices has changed the way users interact with the mobile web, and manufacturers have, to varied degrees, enhanced their built-in browsers to meet the new requirements.

I highly recommend you get around to doing this for your site or blog. We’re not just pandering to Apple device users here – the UI controls will cascade gracefully to other brand devices, whether they incorporate a touch-screen or not. Using a variety of design and coding techniques you can catch that huge cluster of mobile web users and keep them returning.

Return on investment
According to Morgan Stanley, five countries account for 48 percent of internet users, four of which, (Brazil Russia, India and China) are commonly thought to be the most important emerging markets for businesses to focus on. Emerging markets skip past-seen technology trends (for the purpose of this discussion, this means high spec desktop PCs in the home for internet access). This means that a Smartphone is likely the first internet capable device to be used.

This tallies with forecasts that in just a few years the desktop PC will be defunct, and key opinion leaders forecast the mobile web taking over as the preferred.

CMS and plug-in
Check out the images on the right – we used a popular WordPress plug-in combined with a free theme from WordPress.org to optimise how our site is viewed by mobile devices. This plug-in detects the hardware and software being used to access the articles section, and lays out the articles and navigation appropriately.

We set this up in a small amount of time, and the plug-in came at no cost. The benefits are immediately obvious – the whole article fits in the screen and the navigation controls look and feel like familiar iPhone UI elements. We were even able to bring in our own brand colour palette and keep it all looking unique.

The plug-in also adds an element to our blog dashboard’s built-in stats, offering metrics on how often an article is read using a mobile device, and which devices are used.

Go it alone
Of course you could keep up to speed with the manufacturers’ software development kits (SDKs), which document how to code your web pages to use the native system UI controls. Apple and Symbian offer their SDKs for free and provide examples. Forums and tutorials exist for learning how to code your site’s appearance for Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile systems.

A dedicated app
If your outreach is large enough, you could offer an app on the various platforms which download and organise your site’s content, and on some platforms you could push updates to your subscribers.

Content Formula uses WordPress Mobile Pack, a complete toolkit to help mobilize WordPress sites and blogs.