It's estimated that by year 2002 there will be over 800 million wireless users around world. Eventually all wireless tools will come equipped with WAP as standard issue. That's a lot of possible viewers for your website. The problem is that wireless net-surfers will not be able to access your HTML-driven site. Their devices can only read sites built in (get ready for another acronym!) WML.

WML stands for "Wireless Markup Language." (Are you taking notes here?) So if you presently have a website built in HTML and you want mobile users to be able to view it, you'll need to make another version of it in WML. The good news is that WML is not hard to learn and can be picked up easily. Plus, there are plenty of sites online that will teach you everything you'll ever want to know about this new technology. Some of better ones are:

http://www.wapdrive.net Learn what WAP is (and isn't), how to write WAP "cards" (not "pages"), and best of all, you'll find some free software you can download to make your own WAP site. Free.

http://www.wapuseek.com Contains Wap articles, links, tools and more. Make sure you stop in developers area for all kinds of webmaster tools for creating your own WAP pages.

http://www.gelon.net/dev/ A ton of helpful information here: leaning WML, books, where you can host your new WAP sites and more.

http://www.anywhereyougo.com 100% wireless application development: archives, news, books, and more. Sign up for their helpful newsletter to keep abreast of what's going on in this new field.

By coding your url's with some kind of software or an online third party service, you'll know at a glance just how many hits you've received from your latest venture. It's really not as hard as it sounds and there are many free services you can use that won't cost you a dime. Let's take a closer look at a few of them.

1) HyperTracker: http://www.Hypertracker.com

Offering two versions, a free and a paid service coined "Professional," it's simple to sign up and start using. The Pro version runs $10.95 a month and allows you to not only track clicks, but actual sales - plus you can use your own domain in coded links. The free option is simply a stripped down version - minus advanced features and counting only clicks. Complete reports can be mailed to you weekly or daily; your call.

2) StatCruncher: http://www.Statcruncher.om

Offering a 30 day free trial with no software to install, as this is a third party solution. If after 30 days you like it and decide to continue on, it will cost you only $49.00 a year with no additional monthly fees.