People are more and more using mobile and smart phones to use the internet, especially for emails, social networking, geographic based searches.

Some phones still only have simple text based browsers with very small resolutions but others like the iPhone and other smart phones have sophisticated full browsers even if their resolutions is still small compared to desktop PCs and laptops. Browsing speeds are slow and, although providers often advertise “free internet”, there is usually a cap of around 1GB of bandwidth per month. This means that file sizes are at a premium.

Although some standard websites will work on mobile phones, especially smart phones, most companies offer a specialised website specifically for mobile phones. Using the same database, the website detects what the user is browsing on and displays the website accordingly. These different sites take into account the display resolution, graphic capabilities and download speeds of the particular mobile phone. Mobile versions of sites generally have a much lower feature set than the main site.

Mobile phone emulator software is available that allows you to test how a website or email is displayed on a particular phone.