A few years the software guru known as Bill Gates, stated that palm held devices were the future. Looking that the trends in mobile technology, one cannot help but marvel at the insight in that statement. More and more people are using Internet ready Smartphones to browse the Internet. Unfortunately, many webmasters are yet to get their websites "mobile ready". The reason for this is that many people do not know how to do so or simply do not understand how much traffic they could be losing by their failure to make their websites "mobile ready". Luckily, for WordPress users, WP Touch plugin transforms your site into an IPhone style theme. Essentially, anyone viewing your WordPress site using an IPhone or other Smartphone such as Android or Blackberry is able to do so with ease.

The plugin detects the application being used by a user to view your website and delivers its custom theme when a Smartphone is detected. Your regular theme is not affected and visitors using a computer are able to view this theme. Your visitors are also able to switch between the WP Touch theme and the regular website theme.

WP Touch has the additional advantage of being light weight, loads fast, is packed with features and allows customizations when delivering content to Smartphone users. Despite being extremely lightweight, it still has the standard WordPress features, namely;

• Search bar

• Login

• Categories

• Tags

• Photos

• Archives

• Tags

How to use it

Installation is quite easy using the WordPress plugin page in your dashboard. The admin panel is beautifully designed and easy to use. The most important configuration you need to take note of is the multisite feature. Enable this by checking the "Activate WPtouch Site Wide" link. Once this is done, your site can be viewed both on a regular computer and a Smartphone.

A final point needs to be made though and this is that websites are rarely similar in appearance. Some websites fail to view well in a Smartphone or other mobile device despite WP Touch having been installed. This may be as a result of sidebar images, non standard fonts, heavy JavaScript and other bulky features which increase the page load times. However, other than this setback which has been noted on a few websites that use the features described, WP Touch is an excellent plugin. It is without doubt the best way to ensure that you do not lose mobile phone traffic.