Sean Clark and Nemeton Website Updates
Sat, 21 May 2016
At the beginning of the year I began to use the name "Interact Digital Arts" as a focal point for all of my arts activities. As part of this "rebrand" I have now pulled my personal seanclark.me.uk website in to the fold, as well as the long running nemeton.com.
You'll see that both sites now share the Interact Digital Arts look-and-feel and all three sites now share a common navigation. The update also gave me an opportunity to improve the "responsiveness" of both sites so that they should now work fine on phones and tablets. It should ensure that both sites remain to be accessible and appear in search engines.
It would be easy to think that maintaining a collection of websites like mine is a simple thing to do. After all, the older sites don't change very often. However, in almost 23 years of web design I have found that this is far from the case. Web technologies change, as does browsing hardware and software, and links and plugins stop working.
I think that in the long term this is going to be a real problem. I actively maintain my archive, but it is relatively small and I'm still about to look after it. What will happen to all of those 1990s and 2000s sites that were created before web technology really settled down and made use of highly non-standard technologies? Many will become increasingly unusable and even archives such as the UK Web Archive will struggle to render them. It's something to think about if you want your websites to last.
I also wonder if future archaeologists will need to be experts in early Internet and web technologies as much as language and digging skills. In fact, perhaps "Internet Archeologists" even exist now?
