I own a Motorola Q and use it to access the internet daily. With the coming of the new iPhone I believe we will see a significant jump in the number of people using their cell phone to access information from the internet. This should hopefully bring the data access costs down eventually opening up the opportunity for even more people who could not have afforded it before.

In any case, I like to think that the result of this sequence of events will bring our browsing habits closer to those of other countries which are far more connected than us - take, for example - Japan. The ratio of people who use a PC versus a cell phone to access high speed internet in America is flip-flopped in Japan. I’m not saying this will be the same exact case here, I’m saying that if your business model depends on revenue generated primarily online (including generating advertising revenue by providing content) then you need to consider making sure your information is available to this growing population of mobile internet users. Fortunately, Wordpress blogs are easy to read on a mobile phone. : )

This seems like an obvious point though, but I want to point out that A LOT of sites are not ready. Here’s some who are - Half.com – I know this because I regularly preview books at the local bookstore and then purchase them from half.com from my phone while reading the book at the bookstore. The reason I do this is because their site is very usable and the prices are better. Surprisingly, the sites who preach about web standards and the great benefits of them do not have reasonably usable websites. For instance, I love alistapart.com, but I cannot stand reading their site from my phone. Granted you can access all the information, but only if you scroll for 10 minutes and enjoy reading text from a 1/2 inch wide column. I don’t, so I don’t go there - I go to Sitepoint.com, where I can actually read an article.

I will get into this topic more at a later date but basically, if you can be the first site in your industry to offer usable content to a mobile phone user, then I predict that you will most likely keep that user, and for a couple of reasons. I have spent a lot of time looking for sites which I can bookmark on my phone and know that the content will be easily readable. Once I find a site that works (like Sitepoint.com) I’m not even going to think about wasting another minute searching for alternative content providers - who 95% of the time will most likely have websites that look like crap or are unreasonably difficult to use. (BTW, tadalist.com - from the guys at 37signals, looks like crap. I have to scroll for ~20 seconds just to get to my list. It’s unacceptable, and more so because the design is so absolutely simple, this should not be a problem. Blame it on Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 5.0 but it’s your responsibility to just make sure it works regardless.

My conclusion is that if you are considering a redesign, or are designing your first page, consider that the majority of your audience in a couple years may be using a device other than what you designed for to view your content. If you don’t consider it now, you’re only going to be playing catch-up on your next redesign.