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We've just got back from my daughter's wedding and after being away from home for four days we are so happy to be back. Not only is it great to sleep in our own bed again but there's an incredible amount of work that seemed to come in while we were away.

Now it's time to enjoy a really good cup of coffee and start contacting all those people who called while we were out of the office ... but first let's talk about what people see when they visit your site.

Here in Australia it's winter so the further south you go the colder it gets and the more it rains. For this trip we had to go a long way south and when you're thinking about weddings you're also going to be thinking about the weather. So, like any doting mother I was watching the weather forecasts as we headed south.

The main weather site here in Australia clearly understands that there are going to be many people out there who want to get important weather information via their handheld devices and so their site displays very clearly on my iPhone. It loads fast ... it's set out with all the important information on the first screen and less important information just one scroll below.

Not only is it set out well but it's easy to use ... any buttons that you need to click are big and the text is quite readable. They even manage to have a spot on the first screen for some pay-per-click advertising from Google.

Of course, being an inquisitive type of person, I just had to look at what was at the end of a couple of those pay-per-click ads ... especially when one that popped up was for a business here in the town where I live. When I got to the other end of that pay-per-click link I really didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Here was a local business ... a business that's part of an industry in this town that's struggling to survive ... and they were brave enough to try pay-per-click advertising on mobile devices. I thought that was very commendable because others in the same industry here in town aren't prepared to venture into that form of marketing but ...

There's being brave enough to try a new form of marketing and then there's being silly enough to throw good money down the drain with no earthly hope of seeing any return on that waste.

When anyone who saw that ad for that business on their mobile device and clicked on it they weren't taken to a landing page that was designed to be viewed on a mobile device and nor were they taken to a mobile version of the entire website. They were taken to the full version of the site ... the one that was easy to view on a PC or a laptop but was totally unreadable on my iPhone.

You don't even get a chance to scroll up or down, right or left. The entire page was jammed onto the screen and so the text was too tiny to be read and the images were not much more than blobs of color. In this guy's case the fact that the entire page was stuffed onto just one screen was probably due to the content management system that he was using but that may not always be the case.

Steve checked the weather on his iPhone while we were away too and the pay-per-click advertising that he saw was for Land Rover. Steve's a bit of a car nut and we had a bit of time to kill so he clicked the link ... and ended up with exactly the same result as I got.

Here was a major marketing site that was advertising on handheld devices but was delivering the information about their product in a form that was unreadable for anyone who was accessing the marketing site via a handheld device.

So the take-away from all that is really quite simple and yet it's something that even big-time marketers forget to do. You simply have to check your sites in all browsers ... even hand-held ones because you never know who might be looking at your product on something smaller than a 26 inch screen.

And if you're going to play the pay-per-click advertising game and you don't want to waste money then you need to keep a tight control on just where Google is going to display your ads. The last thing you want to do is pay for a click that can't seen because the person who saw your pay-per-click ad is using a handheld device and your site doesn't work on anything but a PC.