YouTube, the popular video sharing site, just announced a mobile version of the site. m.youtube.com is geared toward 3G phones capable of streaming video so it looks like that rules out my Blackberry (according to the R/WW site) but the fact that YouTube has gone mobile is another indication of the trend toward mobile computing.

The fact that you can now watch YouTube videos from a handheld may not mean much to you personally. But the trend, of which this announcement is an indication, should definitely mean something to you. It should motivate you to care about the way you are building websites for your clients.

If you’re slapping them together with crappy code that isn’t optimized for viewing on a handheld, you’re selling your clients a product with a short expiration date. As more and more website visitors use mobile devices, it will become more and more important that the sites they visit work well on a tiny screen (320×240 in the case of my Blackberry 8830).

So you need to use better code then, right? Right. Where do you start? Well, start by learning more about code quality and why it matters. Hire a professional web development company like Agency Fusion if necessary. And get a web-enabled phone or PDA so that you can experience first-hand the frustration your clients’ customers are experiencing when they browse the Web. That’s as good an excuse to upgrade your phone as I can imagine!