Winksite is just an amazing resource for both mobile users and bloggers. There are so many useful services on the site. First of all, bloggers can create a free mobile edition of their blog almost instantly by entering the feed url as shown in the image below.

The first small image shows what the mobile blog looks like on the phone. If you don’t have a blog, you can create a mobile blog hosted by Winksite. Then, using a simple menu driven interface, you can add various content pages to your blog to make it an even richer mobile site.The site doesn’t have to be a blog, that’s just one of the 17 available page templates. There are templates for an about page, announcements, forums, chat rooms, links pages, surveys and several other types of pages. You can’t modify the templates other than by predefined options and there are no images on a Winksite – but you do get a very high quality site. The number of templates and variety of options makes Winksite quite powerful and yet very easy to use. This is point and click mobile site development that anyone can do.You can also create a private password protected site to store your notes, calendar, task list or anything else you want which will then be accessible from any browser (second image).

A neat feature for group collaboration is the template called Field Reports. A user submitting a field report can enter a callback number which will be displayed on the phone as a live WTAI link to call the number. Winksite can also be configured so that when someone creates a new field note an email or SMS is sent to a designated recipient. I can see this being used by a businesses for tracking sales leads or for star sightings on celebrity fan site for example. The forum template has a similar feature to email the site owner when someone posts a comment.

Sites created in Winksite work with just about every WAP1 and WAP2 device and with desktop browsers where Winksite launches a pop up window emulating a mobile browser.

Winksite also has an RSS search tool using search technology provided by Feedster. Searching RSS feeds works really well – particularly for breaking news or the latest rumor or product release announcement. While it takes weeks for a traditional search spider like Google to make it all the way around the net, RSS feeds ping sites like Feedster so that the latest blog entries get added to Feedster as soon as they are published. Your can search Feedster either by search string or by zip code. Zip code searches return RSS news and blog items related to the the area of the zip.

Finally, Winksite makes a pretty good WAP portal. If you choose Site Directory from the front page and then pick either Featured Sites or Editor’s Choice you will be presented with links to mobile versions of some of the best blogs on the web. Another option, Featured Books has links to several ebooks you can read on your phone.

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