It is a cliché to talk about the rapid growth of mobile devices for phone, chat, texting etc. What is less thought about however, is the impact of the trend towards accessing the internet more and more through mobile devices. If you work in an e-business, then you do need to consider some of the following things:

• Can I attract more traffic to my website by tailoring it to mobile devices?
• Can I provide for a better customer experience by customizing my website for mobile devices?
• Will the frequency of my customer visits go up because they now that has the flexibility to easily access my website through a mobile device?

While devices like the iPhone do provide for a relatively similar experience as your wired website will, there are hundreds of other devices -- Cellphones, blackberry, Treos, Gaming devices like the Playstation, Xbox, PDAs – that would need a different view of your website, for a better, faster customer experience.
 
What’s new about mobile browsing?
 
The most important difference when thinking about mobile browsing is the form factor. While most websites are designed for a 1200 x 1680 or sometimes even as low as 800 x 600, most of the mobile devices work with with form factors that are very much smaller. This can result in several important tradeoffs :

• You will not be able to show all the content that you show on your wired website. Consequently, a lot of the content would need to laid out in a different manner : moving into different pages, moving up/down/left/right in a particular page or plain simple, removed
• Perhaps more sophisticated content like AJAX, Javascript, Flash might not render correctly in a mobile device. This needs to be accounted for 

A second difference is that the browser universe is different. From specialized browsers like Openwave, Access and Blackberry, you need to contend with specialized browsers from the more traditional vendors for the wired world, such as IE, Firefox and Opera. This would mean a whole another level of complexity in controlling your website experience, IT development needs and web experience testing requirements.
 
A third difference will be that the bandwidth assumptions that are made for a wired world, will not necessarily apply to this universe. This would again have implications on what content is shown, what is not, whether to show images or not, how will videos be shown etc.
 
A fourth difference is in the browser navigation pattern. Wired websites assume a mouse and a keypad with the enter, tab etc buttons. This navigation metaphor doesn’t necessarily translate to mobile devices. While more basic operations like clicking on a hyperlink or hitting a submit button might be simple enough, more advanced operations like ___(?) might need more thinking and customization.
 
A fifth difference is that any advanced applications (like the upsell/crosssell at the shopping cart level, detailed checkout,  product configurator, or product visualizer) might not easily translate to mobile devices. If they are important enough to be shown to mobile users, they might need rework.
 
How to get started?
 
A good place to start would be evaluate the nature and amount of mobile traffic coming to your current website. By doing a few tweaks to your analytics system, you can get a good sense for amount of mobile traffic coming to your site, and also understand the kind of devices that this is coming from : cellphones, Blackberry, Treos etc.
 
The next step would be understand whether the goals of this mobile traffic is different from the traffic to your wired site. For example, do they want to perform any specific functions (Eg. Browse the latest baseball score on a sports website, check the status of an order they have placed etc) rather than just browse the site and gain the entire website experience? A breakdown of this traffic and understanding the click-patterns will provide powerful insights into how the mobile website can be tailored specifically to the needs of your mobile users.
 
The final step would be to evaluate whether it makes sense to do infrastructure investments to provide a mobile version of your website. It is important to be pragmatic in this venture, and an important scoping factor will be the number and kind of devices that you want to support for a customized experience. The IT costs can vary significantly based on this decision.
 
Thinking about Technology Solutions

At this stage, customizing your website for mobile audiences will mostly have to be a custom effort, as there are very (to no) products that can provide this off-the-shelf. Regardless of whether you do it internally or outsource it, there are few important guidelines to follow :

• Customizing your mobile website should never involve “back-end” development in the form of changing business logic or doing database work etc. Fundamentally all work will be limited to the “front-end” – meaning at the HTML/XHTML/XML level. This simple observation will make this effort a far less intrusive and far simpler initiative than if you had to touch the “back-end”
• There will be multiple “transformers” that transform the core HTML/XHTML/XML that is available to the wired website, into a “transformed” mobile website that is unique to that device/form-factor etc.
• The architectural design pattern to follow for these “transformers” is called a “Factory Pattern” that essentially provides a unique “transformer object” to each incoming request based on the nature/form-factor of the requesting device.