We recently bought our first smartphones in some years and their use has made us aware of important issues we hadn’t realized.  First, this website and others we have been developing are hard to peruse on smartphones – not because of the limited resolution of the phone screens, but because of the large amount of scrolling required to read the text.  For example, to read the “About this site” page one needs to swipe about 9 times.  If a web page’s audience is mostly using smartphones, the page’s authors are faced with the need to “dumb-down” or otherwise condense the content to reduce the need to swipe endlessly – otherwise readers quickly lose attention.  Thus, in this Internet age of nearly unlimited information, we see a tendency to simplify content to make it accessible to the largest audience possible.  Facebook and similar posts are likewise increasingly without textual content.

We are convinced that effective internet use requires large monitors that can be connected to a laptop, for example.   Browsing of the internet requires the relaxed “real estate” of a large monitor.  You may want to have several windows open at once.  Most of our images are 1680 pixels or more across and benefit from a larger monitor. We hope that anyone encountering our websites for the first time does not do so on a smart phone, or if so, they return to our websites later with a larger monitor to enjoy the experience.