With the proliferation of handheld gadgets and WAP enabled cell phones, more consumers are accessing online content via these devices; presenting challenges for site owners wanting to better serve this group

While it’s possible to view a normal web page on a cell phone browser, it’s a pain in the butt for the viewer; so increasing numbers of merchants are making mobile versions of their content.

A few years back, I published a beginners guide to writing for WAP enabled devices, but that really was just for bare bones stuff and more suited to previous generation browsers. If you’d like to get together a fully functional mobile version of your site together, but don’t have a lot of time or cash, take a look at Ubrik.

Ubik is a web tool that enables you to build mobile websites without any technical knowledge or training. A step by step wizard leads you through the process to build a mobile-optimized version of your web site. There’s dozens of templates to choose from and the service is compatible with over 5,000 different mobile devices. The service is free.

For the past couple of years, M-Commerce has been touted as The Next Big Thing; but it appears its time is finally about to arrive; so if you can spare a bit of time, it couldn’t hurt to at least get some sort of bare bones representation up for your business that’s easily viewable to mobile device users.

While your site will take on the name of sitename.ubik.net if you use the service; you could always set up a mobile.yoursite.com alias to point to that and promote that name in case you want to go it alone and build a mobile site from scratch in the future, independent of Ubik.