Reading#1 Response

In a list Apart: Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem by Karen McGrane, she talks about responsive design and how responsiveness is not a good enough content strategy for fixing a website. This surprised me a little, since I knew that responsiveness isn’t the only thing that makes a website a good website. Content management is the key. She goes into responsive design and starting from the mobile version. She continues on, taking about breaking the website down to its absolute necessity. If we add filler content, then the website could be hard to navigate. Looking back on the previous semester, planning the website is the hardest yet most important part of website design. She continues discussing this exactly. Karen continues discussing your content and revising your content. She says and I quote “even though the long-term goal is to serve the same content to every platform, organizations can’t just use what they already have. Smart companies will seize this opportunity to … clean up and pare down their desktop content.” This made me think about my design, and moving forward, how to strategize my content. When I was making my website, I was thinking about my portfolio as a 960 grid. When optimizing for different screens, I realized my design is hard to transfer to other sites. Something else this made me think about is my ‘future proofing’ of my site. Content is always evolving, so thinking about your content as an ever-changing thing is really important. Karen finals out her argument saying that responsive design will not fix the content. If the process, optimizing the design, and managing your content isn’t there, then adding responsiveness doesn’t change anything. At the moment, adding responsiveness to a website that was designed to be stationary is very difficult. Having the design move and change isn’t easy, but is very rewarding. I believe my content can change accordingly.