With a staggering amount of mobile devices on the web you want to take a look how your site looks on the hottest new devices such as Apple's 3G iPhone. As much as I love design, when I'm mobile and looking for content I appreciate clean simple accessibility.

Smartphones like the iPhone do have full html browsers but navigating through pages and links can be time consuming on non-mobile ready sites. Optimizing your site for mobile readiness reduces loading times and makes your site work a lot smoother with Edge or 3G connections.
Additionally it will avoid displaying unsupported formats on your site such as flash (sigh ....).

" iPhonizing " your site isn't as complicated as you might think. You won't even need to get your hands dirty in coding, I promise.
As a start if you haven't seen your site on the iPhone check out testiphone or iphonetester using Safari (preferably) and view your site through a graphical representation of the iPhone.

If you're a mac user try the iPhoney 1.2. desktop client which emulates an iPhone on your desktop.
Look up any url within the Phony iPhones Safari browser.

InterSquash
Web 2 App conversion site, InterSquash is free and will iPhonize your blog or site using your RSS feed. InterSquash offers a free and premium service.
After submitting your RSS feed InterSquash generates a tag for your site which is easily embedded in your index page.  Mobile users are redirected to a mobile version of your site hosted by InterSquash.

Your posts or articles are displayed similar to an RSS reader. Aside from uploading an icon not much style or settings to tweak in the free version. Users have reported problems when using feedburner RSS feeds as opposed to your site's RSS feed. I tried both of my RSS feeds and had no luck with feedburners feed.

InterSquash also offers a premium version for $ 2.99 which will allow you to upload a custom icon 57x57 and logo. The custom icon
will be displayed on the home screen of the device if your site is bookmarked. Premium allows you to customize background, links, text ,titles and borders.
This is an easy and simple way to optimize your site for us iPhone and iPod Touch users.

InterSquash currently getting 300,000 page views a month went up for sale today at SitePoint for a minimum bid of $1000, sold for $1500. Site was established Oct 14th and created by British developer Jon Wheatley.

WPTOUCH
If you have a Wordpress site you can install the free WPTOUCH mobile theme as a plug-in on your server.

The plug-in will not change your main theme and will only be viewed by iPhones and iPod touch users. The theme displays an elegant default menu at the top of your Wordpress site displaying home, about, rss and e-mail.
Add custom icons to the menu links and pages. Title pages specific names like "photos" and "archives" and WPTOUCH will aggregate information to the mobile pages such as your flickr feed. WPTOUCH integrates your flickr stream, blip.tv, wordpress links, gravatar, WP Cache plug-ins as well as your categories and tags.

Also users have the ability to switch back and forth to mobile and standard mode.  If you have a Wordpress site this is the way to go. It takes a few more minutes to install than using the InterSquash or VenueM services but the plug-in looks more appealing and doesn't redirect users to another host.

VenueM
VenueM is free and will create a mobile version of your site for iPhone or Android devices. Like InterSquash, VenueM takes your RSS feed and generates a tag to embed into your site. The code redirects the mobile user to your mobile version that VenueM hosts. For example my mobile version would be http://venueM.net/brodiebeta.

The page displays two links to "share this" and to visit the website in standard mode. Your able to customize and change the colors of the theme for free unlike InterSquash. Analytics of your site are available in your accounts dashboard. All users can now view basic analytics for their web sites and native applications. VenueM offers 2 widgets to add for mobile users to link to mobile browsing and integrates with flickr.

VenueM offers a premium version as well which will support custom themes, text overrides, Google adsense and Admob. Cost not advertised.



Luckily iPhonizing your site is fairly simple and the basic service from all three developers is free which is nice.  The competition between the services is not limited to aesthetic value but to the number of options they can translate. Currently VenueM pulls ahead of InterSquash in functionality and integration. VenueM offers theme customization in the basic version unlike InterSquash and VenueM has more integration in the premium version.

I ultimately chose to use the WPTouch Plug-in as I have a Wordpress site and I feel it is aestheticly superior. Look forward to seeing which developers come up with the best aesthetics and integration in mobile theming.