An overall site conversion ratio may not provide level of detail needed to make greatest possible improvements. An overall conversion ratio would be calculated by taking number of orders generated and dividing it by total number of visitors to arrive at a percentage. But some sites may have traffic coming to many different areas for reasons other than purchasing - content areas of general interest, financial information, job seekers, etc. To really expose specific areas of improvement, it might be necessary to break stats down to further level of detail.

For example, you may want to calculate a conversion ratio based on number of visitors reaching your "shopping cart" page. This way, you can make improvements to your shopping cart page and know that your results aren't being skewed by traffic to other areas of your site. You may have 500 visitors reaching your shopping cart page while at same time you are generating 10 orders. Your conversion ratio is 2% for this comparison. By making improvements to your shopping cart page, you may see this ratio improve to 5% - generating 25 orders for every 500 visitors to this page.

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.