Technology, diversification, production values and access

One of the emails I received today was from WordPress.com. I subscribe to their emails because I am not a greatly technically proficient.  I love technology and am interested all things computer and internet related but have only dabbled with learning coding (this is a good site) and tend to use sites and enabling software rather than try and build fully customised things from the ground up. However the price I pay for this is that I am limited to the templates offered by software companies like WordPress and Weebly and so the presentations viewers see are not wholly in my control.

Yet this situation seems little different from pre digital photographers as the work they produced was often printed and published  by specialists and so the constraints may have changed but have always been present in some shape and form. This issue arose today when I received the email mentioned above.

I had viewed my blog site on an Ipad but not on my phone and so tested it by using one of the sites suggested in the email. The results were not good.

Clearly I had not considered the viewer experience when accessing my blog from their phone. So I followed through on the advice on how to rectify to deficit and then viewed the end product on my iphone. The result was much better.

But just to make sure I retested the site with the Google analysis and the result was positive.

Thoughts
This issue of if and how I produce an online or wholly digital version for of of my final exhibition work will need to involve my considering the changing nature of digital consumption as people are viewing less and less from their desktop computers and more and more via phones and tablets. But this process is not wholly controlled by the consumer. For example, analysis here suggests that Google is just now moving to prioritise mobile friendly sites in its search engine rankings and that seems pretty important to me. When was the last time you bothered going beyond the first page of search results when using a search engine? (Never?)

So I have a few things to think about: my online products and how I make them mobile friendly otherwise my work will just become buried under the dearth of data already out their.  But just now I need to check my Weebly sites are mobile friendly….

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