Statistics tell us that about 80% of Canadians use a mobile phone, with roughly one quarter of them being smart phones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc). Every day, more and more people are accessing the web on their mobile device while on the go. When you consider that mobile plans run their course on 3 year cycles, with options to renew/upgrade sooner, my prediction is that within the next three years you will see a large increase in mobile browsing rates using smart phones such as the iPhone. The question isn't to mobile or not to mobile? The question becomes how can I get mobile right now.
If you took a snapshot of most websites today, you'd discover that over 90% are completely unsuited to mobile viewing. They either take over a minute to load, and/or, when the website does finally render to your mobile display, the text is totally jumbled, there is no clear navigation, the primary calls to action are buried, or completely lost. In a recent report, Google announced that mobile searches grew 130 percent compared to this time last year. No surprise though, everyone I know bought the new iPhone 4 this past year. It won't be long before your mobile website brings in just as much site traffic as your 'brick and mortar' website.
Viewing a website from a laptop at home gives you the luxury of a big screen, a large keyboard, a mouse, a stable internet connection, fewer distractions and lots of time to browse at your discretion. In contrast, people accessing a website from a mobile device such as an iPhone are often in a hurry, they're on the go, multi tasking, and at the whim of signal strength and network congestion. In either scenario the end goal of all website visitors remains the same; they want real time information with as little effort as possible. A mobile version of your website built on Drupal fills this gap and in the not-so-distant future, will become an indispensable extension of your website.
While do-it-yourself mobile website creation tools do exist online, ultimately you get what you pay for. Working with a trusted Drupal web development vendor will give you the best results getting your website mobile-ized.