If you’re a small business owner with a website that doesn’t look great on mobile devices, help is here. And it’s free.

Get the details.

This short e-book will unlock the mysteries of creating a special web page that will be shown automatically to anyone who visits your website on a mobile phone.

The e-book will help if your homepage has a lot of big images, like the homepage at the SeaDoc Society. (Visit seadocsociety.org on a mobile phone to see the automatic detection and redirection in action.) It’ll help if your homepage has a big Flash slideshow that doesn’t show up on mobile devices. And it’ll help if your page just comes across cluttered and hard to navigate.

You can go from this:

to this:

Or from this:

to this:

You can do this yourself, for free, without having to hire a designer or sink a lot of money and time into a solution.

Click to continue…

Mobile web usage is growing. Are you ready?

For many small businesses, creating a website that functions decently on mobile browsers is the last thing on their mind.

And it’s easy for people to tell themselves it doesn’t matter. After all, isn’t mobile web traffic just 1% of all web traffic?

I can definitely understand this perspective. Particularly when you think about how hard it can be to solve the mobile website problem. I’ve often noticed that when you don’t see a viable solution to a problem, it’s really hard to keep that problem top of mind.

But mobile web traffic is not going away. In fact, it’s growing steadily. For details, check out the article, Mobile Web traffic grows, not slows, during summer, on Mobile Marketer Daily.

Here are a few highlights:

• According to Nielsen, “the number of consumers accessing the mobile Internet in the United States has jumped from 54 million in May 2009 to 72 million in May 2010, a year-over-year increase of 34 percent.”
• The mobile analytics firm Ground Truth has found that mobile users are on the web for an average of 3 hours a month and view an average of 1,000 pages a month.

Traditional web traffic dips in the summer as people are outside playing instead of stuck at home in front of their computers.

But web traffic through handhelds is not dropping. And if you think about it, it makes sense. When we’re out and about, our phones are right there with us. I recently drove to California and back with my family, and we used the mobile web constantly throughout the trip, whether to get maps, find interesting places to eat, or find things to do. In contrast, I opened my laptop only a couple of times.

So what’s a small business owner to do?

Well, you can invest the time and money to create a website that works on mobile phones (but check first — your existing site may be perfectly decent). But while you’re pondering that (and putting it off), there are plenty of other actions you can take.

For example, make sure to update your listing on Google Local and on Yelp. Find out how people are searching for businesses on their phones and make sure you’re part of the results. (Don’t have a phone? Don’t know what apps people are using? Ask them!)

Where are the good coffee shops?

Don’t think this effort will matter? Check out this search I just did on Yelp’s iPhone app for coffee shops near me. Where is Enzo’s? Straight Shots? Teezers? KT Chocolates? Those are 4 excellent and distinctly different places to get a cup of coffee within half a mile of my location, but none of them show up. It would take less than 20 minutes for any of those businesses to get listed on Yelp, and that could result in hundreds of dollars of additional income over the summer tourist season.

(The only listing that’s there is a misplaced pin for a fine dining establishment.)

Photo credit: iphonepics via Flickr creative commons

Update: June 2011. Check out my free guide to building your own mobile friendly page for your small business site.

You can’t ignore it any longer.

The mobile internet is here. People are using their mobile phones to visit sites on the internet. Mobile browsers are hitting the mainstream.

How many people are browsing with mobile browsers?

Take your head out of the sand

Try 50 Million of them. And the number is growing every month.

Which means that people are definitely visiting your site from their mobile phones, with mobile browsers.

Here’s the question you need to ask yourself:

What does a person using a mobile browser they see when they call up your website?

(Hint: It’s probably not good.)

Now, I could show you pictures all day about how mediocre other people’s sites are when viewed on mobile browsers, but the only site you really care about is your own. That’s natural.

So let’s find out what your site looks like.

First, though, you’ll need to understand that this exercise is not going to give you a 100% accurate result. With so many different phones running so many different operating systems and mobile browsers, the best you can hope for is an approximation.

But an approximation can be useful. For example, which of these two versions of Wikipedia would hold your interest?

Wikipedia for desktop

Wikipedia for mobile browser

The first image is what most websites look like on mobile. You can use the site, but not well.

The second image shows a mobile optimized site. You can read the text! Which would you rather have?

Here’s how to check out your own site:

Visit http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/ (but don’t click just yet; there are a few things I want to explain)

This site shows you a virtual cell phone running the Opera Mini mobile browser. This mobile browser isn’t on every smartphone, but it’s pretty representative. If your site looks great on Opera Mini, it’ll probably look great on other mobile browsers. If it doesn’t, it probably won’t.

The best thing about this demo site is that you don’t have to download anything. If you do an Internet search you’ll find many different mobile browser emulators available, but most of them require a download. Many are geared toward professional developers, and require not only that you download software, but also that you know how to extract, configure, and run things from the command line. Not worth the trouble!

Here’s how to use the Opera site:

1. Call up the site. If the site doesn’t display a virtual cell phone screen, try a different browser. (Firefox works.)

2. Click the “accept” button. (This step took me a while to figure out. Probably I should have read the instructions!)

3. Enter your URL in the mobile browser:

Enter your URL

4. Look at the results.

5. Cringe.

6. Whimper. (Optional)

If your site looks like this one, that’s totally typical:

Typical results for mobile browsers

The good news is, we can fix this.

As I warned above, this image of your site is not 100% accurate, but it will give you a good idea.

Let’s contrast this with a site that has been (minimally) designed for mobile. This is just a test site, FYI, not a real live version.

Test site designed for mobile

Notice any difference?

Other emulators:

If you’re running on Mac, there’s a decent application that’s worth downloading to see how your site looks on an iPhone. It’s called iPhoney, and you can get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iphonesimulator/. It’s interesting, but not perfect.

On Windows, you can download any number of simulators from Microsoft and manufacturers like Nokia.

But you shouldn’t waste your time. The simulator above gives you a good enough idea of what people see.

Next steps:

If you’re running a blog in WordPress, there are several plugins to “mobilize” your site. Take a look at http://ielectrify.com/design/wordpress-mobile/ for a rundown on the different options.

If you’re a regular small business owner with a regular website, check out my free guide to building your own mobile friendly page for your small business site

I have quite a bit more to say about mobile-friendly websites for small businesses. If you want to be sure to stay in the loop, sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

(If you’re like me you’re fully confident right now that you’ll remember to check back for the next installment in a few days, but you’re a busy person and it’s probably going to slip your mind. So do yourself a favor and sign up. It’s painless and there’ll be tons of value over the long term. Plus you get my free report on fixing up your website.)

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(Photo credit for head in sand man: jvh33 via Flikr)