With the battle between the smartphone giants Apple and Android (amongst other market leaders) raging on fiercely this year, the number of web users taking advantage of the mobile browsers has risen dramatically. Contemporary web designers should surely be taking mobile users’ needs into consideration now that over 15% of the UK’s internet traffic relies on mobile phone access? According to a recent study conducted by Heart Internet, one of the leading hosting companies in the country, only 50% of 500 web designers surveyed take mobile users into consideration when building a new site.

There’s no denying that the majority of designers and developers are still creating sites for the desktop platform above all other browser options, which is considered by many to be a backwards approach. Now that the mobile web market has risen to such prominence within the industry (according to recent statistics, more smartphones are being shipped into retail outlets than desktop PCs), there are a number of free webmaster tools that are available for professional web designers to utilise if they currently have limited experience when it comes to web design with WAP compliancy in mind. In particular, goMobi offers fast and easy ways for business owners to convert their existing site to comply with the requirements of all mobile phones, while there are a number of free sites that offer the same service such as Google Mobilizer (also known as the Google Conversion Utility) and mobisiteGalore.

With recent trends in mind, designers should take into consideration that their client is likely to be missing out on huge volumes of traffic if their site lacks functionality when it’s viewed with mobile devices. Similarly, search engines such as Google index mobile listings differently to traditional web listings, so from the point of view of an SEO company it would be important to explore the impact that mobile search has on their clients’ SERPs and code sites accordingly.