Small-world network concept deals with the addition of a few Long-ranged Links (LLs) in a network to significantly bring down the average path length (APL) of the network. Existing small-world models do not consider the presence of multiple gateways and, therefore, we propose Multi-Gateway Aware LL addition Strategy (M-GAS). Further, the presence of multiple gateways brings forth the additional issue of traffic load balancing. We modify the M-GAS to propose Load balanced M-GAS (LM-GAS) for load balancing in small-world WMNs. For uniform and random placement of gateways, we present results from M-GAS and LM-GAS strategies. Our results provide early insights in achieving high load balancing in small world WMNs. © 2010 IEEE.