My two cents today.

I have a couple of questions, the answers which maybe the admins can get from Management. The site re-design is pretty clearly designed for vertically oriented phone rather than horizontally oriented graphics machines. I do realize there are stats floating around that say that something like 80-90% of sales will be on tablets and phones by 2017 (not the actual numbers just an approximation from memory. if someone has a better number please post it as a correction or clarifcation).

(A) What percentage of customers from Rendo shop for products on smart phones currently?

(B) Is it realistic to think that people using high powered graphics machines will be using smart phones to purchase items at Renderosity in the near future? (I really have no idea).

(C) I can see the need for what you are trying to do, but is it possible you are too early for your target market? Being too early with technology happens a lot.

A number of years ago I did some advanced work with a colleague for Will Vinton Studios in Oregon. The take away lesson was that artists liked things simple and generally resisted having to learn new technologies unless they were directly related to what they were doing in art. Extrapolating to Rendo I can see that artists would spend oodles of time on a new renderer, but maybe balk about having to learn tasks on somebody's website, or even learn to use a phone to access the website if it meant unproductive time relative to their art. (Artists out there - Right or wrong?).

(D) Can you take a poll of your users here in the forum? Is there a poll set-up function available? In this case the feedback you get might be worthwhile.

Here are some of my suggested Poll Questions of customers AND vendors if such a feature were available:

(1) Do you do your 3D work on a desktop machine or smartphone or tablet?

(2) Is your primary work machine connected to the web, or firewalled for security reasons? (If there is a trend to fiewalling the fast expensive graphics machines, it means that the machines accessing the web are something else).

(3) How do you normally access the web (desktop or tablet or smartphone or combination)?

(4) If you have a smartphone or tablet, how much time on any given day might you spend surfing the web?

(5) Do you currently make any household or personal purchases on a smartphone or tablet?

(5a) Would you say a lot or a little

(6) Do you surf any sites related to 3D on your tablet or phone in your spare time? Do you periodically TRY to look to see if there are any new 3D sites out there when you're on your phone or tablet?

(7) If Renderosity was easily available on a phone are you likely to take a look at it in the next six months?

(7) Under what conditions might you start making purchases at Rendo on your smartphone or tablet, if the company had a viable app.

I know that it has been in the news that Google has been saying they are looking to penalize firms in their ad search if a site isn't easily navigated on a smartphone, but that may not matter here. Aside from the fact that I'm not sure how important that Google is to Renderosity's target market (It's not like you type in 'airconditioner' and you want rendo to come up first; you probably already know Rendo BECAUSE you're in 3D), there is the issue that when you try to talk to Google about what is compliant, they seem to demure and there has been pushback. Being on the leading edge to convert Rendo to tablet might not be as important to do in this market as it might be for a Sears or JC Penny and it might be wiser until other sites figure out the pitfalls and get the auto resizes to work better. So far, I don't like the metro style that has evolved.

My two cents for the day. I will check back another time, though I do have some RRewards to finish using before the end of the month. BTW I don't see myself shopping for anything at rendo on a phone in the next year, maybe two, but I may be deciding between tablet and laptop for more web access, though it will likely be wifi access not high priced data plan.