I always caution small business people about spending too much money on their first website. I've told them how it was possible to build one for nothing by using one of the free starter sites offered by many registrars. This would give them a chance to get their feet wet without the threat of drowning in red ink (Boy do I love to mix metaphors!).

At the time I was thinking of the more conventional generic Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .Com, .Net and .Org, but there was no reason you couldn't do it with any domain you wanted to, even an exotic one like .Mobi. The strength of .Mobi, after all, isn't in some esoteric software but in its ability to associate any website with the mobile web. At least that was once the case; now Dot Mobi has come up with a couple of imaginative ways of increasing their market share.

I admit to being a bit slow taking to the mobile web. Maybe it's because cell phone screens are too small for my aging eyes and my fingers too big for their tiny keyboards. But whether I like it or not the simple fact is that there are now three or four times as many people on the mobile web as the old Internet, and I want my business site appearing where the people are. What business person doesn't?

Of course you can still build your site with one of these free starter sites, but for a few dollars more (fully functional web hosting can be had for less than three dollars a month) you can now display your .Mobi pages on a site designed specifically for the mobile web. The actual design will be constructed and implemented free.

How? You ask, having been around a while and knowing there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Simple. Some really big operators are hoping to make a lot of money on the mobile web; and in order to do so they need to get .Mobi into every cell phone. The mTLD, the global registrar for .Mobi, is made up of cell phone giants like Nokia and search leviathans like Google and Microsoft. (Note: if you google this acronym, be sure the “m” isn't in caps; the MTLD stands for the “Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties,” an Algerian political party formed in 1946)

There are two ways to go about this. First method is using Site.mobi.Com. This interesting browser-based website design tool does the authoring on your browser without downloading any software, and you can host the site anywhere you wish. I attempted to build a website at Site.Mobi and discovered that when they called it browser-based they apparently didn't mean just any old browser. I started with IE7 and almost lost my mind with the editing problems. Google Chrome worked. Safari gave me a bunch of quirky error messages. Firefox did the trick.

The Site.mobi program gives you 18 templates to work from. I chose the first one and uploaded my company logo. But for some reason the company name at the very top of the template was limited to 15 spaces or characters. What's that about, do you suppose? They didn't limit the characters on the page names. I tried inserting text and code from my .Com; it took the text and rejected the code. I can't claim to be a genius with code, but I wouldn't think too many of those types will be using this system anyway. Why make it so difficult for dummies like me? Don't let me discourage you. The Site.Mobi program does work and you can build a very functional site--with a bit of patience. It also has a testing service that shows you where your site will function well or poorly on various cell phones.

The Site.Mobi browser-based program worked well enough, but I will state a preference for the second method of creating a mobi site. It's called Instant Mobilizer. You could call it the lazy man's mobilizer! It's also from Dot Mobi, but it's found at most of the big registrars and their resellers. All you need for this thing to work is an existing website and a .Mobi extension. All you need to do is forward your .Mobi domain to your .Com or whatever domain. Then you go into your DNS controls (or have the support people at your registrar do it for you) and click on the Instant Mobilizer link. Shazaam! You're on the mobile web!

I know, I didn't believe it at first either, but it works. I couldn't figure out where the new .Mobi site was as it didn't appear in my hosting center. A techie friend of mine said it wasn't a real site, it was a formatted ghost. Ok, it isn't perfect, you can't get into the code for analysis but it does appear on your cell phone in a form very different and more easily manipulated than on your original site. I don't know about ghosts, so I decided it was magic. The only real problem I've had with it was that all the sites my .Mobi site links to are .Coms and won't render well on cell phones. If you're interested take a look at both my sites and see what you think.