Once upon a time, my cell phone was only capable of calling people.

Until I bought a Droid. Sure, it's made some things more convenient, but it's annoying to look at websites that don't have a mobile version. So, as I was waiting for a non-mobile site to load the other day, I wondered:

Maybe that’s true of visitors to our hospital’s site, too?

Our interactive agency showed us comparative graphs of visits to our hospital’s websites by operating system. Where standard browsers used to dominate our total visits, they now are in strong company with visits to our sites from iPhone, Android, iPod, Blackberry, Palm OS, and even Playstation 3. We had 551 unique visits from iPhone last month alone, compared to only 61 last year.

We decided to take our hospital mobile.

While the data suggests that a mobile site might be a clever idea, it's really all about providing convenience to patients, visitors, and families. Here are five things to consider if you're considering a mobile site:

1. Look at your most visited pages from your main site to see whether these might be helpful for your mobile consumers. Examples: finding a physician, facility locations, and maps of your hospital.
2. Can those pages be condensed to fit within a mobile format without losing anything important? Good mobile sites are concise.
3. Think about your "waiting room" audience. We included our "Send an e-Card" function on the mobile site.
4. Keep it simple. Mobile sites are supposed to be stripped down. The fewer images, the faster it loads.
5. Get a good interactive agency to teach you all of the above...

Any other tips? Let's share.