I can’t resist a home renovation project. Changing how a room or the whole house functions brings me great joy. My construction adverse wife, bless her, is convinced that something is seriously wrong with me. The recent spate of cold weather had me in the crawl space of our 112-year-old house making sure the water supply lines were properly insulated. Pondering insulation options, Joe my helper, whips out his blackberry and begins a web search.

This is just one example of how mobile browsing is changing traditional web strategies. Blackberry, iPhone, Android and others are attracting record number of users to mobile browsing. Mobile browsers like Safari and Opera are evolving  to dramatically improve the mobile web browsing experience. With these radical changes taking place, the lines between the desktop and mobile browsing experience have started to blur.

Half of Nielsen Online‘s top 20 most trafficked websites are not optimized for mobile devices, despite the fact that mobile web users now account for an average of 5 percent of all site visitors, according to a new survey conducted by mobile web solutions provider Bango.

The survey reports that websites are not keeping pace with mobile browsing trends, with many websites admitting to Bango they do not even know how much mobile-originated traffic hits their sites–Bango’s own research suggests mobile web surfers now account for anywhere between 3 percent and 10 percent of all site traffic.

As we move forward with our web strategies, mobile browsing must be part of the discussion. There are a number of things that you can do to enhance the ever-growing mobile browsing experience. Thanks Sami Mäkeläinen for these initial ideas when planning your mobile browsing strategy.

Make a light-version of your site – light in terms of size, that is. Make images smaller, optimize the page structure, skip some videos, cut some ads etc. Websites exceeding one megabyte per page are not a joy to download over any wireless connections.

Don’t skimp on the content. Having a “light” site doesn’t mean you should leave out content. Some service providers apparently think that mobile users don’t need all that content – wrong! It’s a sure way to annoy people if you put one tenth of your content or shortened versions of articles on the mobile site.

Take it easy with the ads! Small, relevant advertisements are acceptable and might even be welcome, but simply porting the current web-situation to the mobile side is unacceptable.

Don’t use Java. Having Java applets perform any critical function will effectively block out all mobile users.
Consider a client if your service would significantly benefit from it. A case in point is gmail – it works tolerably via the browser, but it works wonderfully with its own downloadable client.

Make the redirection to the mobile site automatic. This is one of the most important things, and if done right, does not conflict with the point below on being able to access the full site.

Allow access to the full site. Some people may not want to visit only the mobile-optimized site from their device but would rather have access to the full one. It should therefore be possible to easily access the full standard site via a link from the mobile site. Google does this well by putting a link in their mobile version that allows you to access the regular version.

As the mobile browsing experience continues to grow our web strategy must evolve. Whether it is in the crawl space or jet space, people are working differently – websites are going to have to work differently too.