With the mass adoption of smart phones, the landscape has changed forever on how people prefer to investigate on the web. As you can imagine "investigate" has a multitude of meanings and applications depending on your business. First let's start with some eye opening facts about usage on how many people are using their smart phones as a primary device for collecting data. This data is taken from a recently completed 2010 survey but you can expect that usage has increased by double digit percentages since this last report.

You'll quickly notice a 15% increase over 2009 for people accessing the internet utilizing their smart phones. This report, provided by Pew Internet (Full Report), also doesn't account for the fact that as the viewable screens of these devices continue to increase, the viability of using mobile devices and tablets to browse the internet is greatly increased.

Taking this information into account, a mobile website should be easy to manage, but more importantly, be designed for the different mobile platforms. Here is a quick list of why a mobile website is important to the customers you serve today and to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

Why a mobile website is important to your customers:

1. It's a fast and effective platform for providing automated contact information and targeted content.

2. Mobile features allow for even easier direct communication. Two examples would be the ability to click one button and have the phone dial your company or allow for immediate GPS navigation to your facility.

3. More and more mobile devices are in the hands of your customers and they are no longer using them just for phone service.

Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly:

1. Your website may not be viewable in its current format on mobile platforms or may not work at all depending on the technologies you use. It is typically easy and quick to get a mobile website stood up supporting multiple platforms at once like iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

2. If you use a content management system such as Drupal or WordPress you have native support for detecting phone types and serving up single source content without having to create custom pages for doing a mobile website.

Basically, creating a mobile website is a cost effective way for you to gain a greater market share over your competitors, connect seamlessly with your clients, and is cost effective over the development of complicated mobile applications which are platform specific and increasingly difficult to maintain. If you've got an existing content management system that supports mobile or are looking to do a new web project to address any of your internet properties, it's a wise decision to start addressing a mobile version of your website.