I wrote a piece for the Australia Council of the Arts:
The web wasn’t designed to be made of pristine brochure pages. If you’ve ever tried to manage a web project, you’ll know that each version of each web browser displays pages just a little bit differently, making perfectly-rendered designs impossible. What’s less obvious is that the web’s style system was designed to be separable from the content on your website. Anyone can choose to view your site in the style of their choice. A website is not a publication: it’s living, breathing content.
To an arts professional or marketer used to the fineries of print publishing, these aspects to online life might sound scary. Instead, I’d argue that they’re an opportunity. The web, unlike any other communications medium, is endlessly remixable, reprogrammable and reshareable. There’s no doubt that your website should be the centre of your digital presence. But for your audience, it’s not the destination; it’s an information source that feeds into their notification stream. Users want to find, share, discover and remix your content – why fight them?
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