deviantArt?

[ratcreature]

I was in the mood to look at some fanart and decided to browse deviantArt, also wondering whether it might be good as another place to post my stuff. So I just went to the site, and previously I've always followed links to an artist or a picture, and I wasn't too thrilled with the site design then, but on that level it works okay. But how does

Comments

[ratcreature]

I totally understand. To get even so far that I now know the basic stuff (I think) took me hours of poking around and wasting time there, and the wikipedia article about it for reference because I couldn't even figure out what to search for in the FAQ and you can't easily browse them. (That really was a breakthrough, because it explains the offered functionality, also what all the symbols before the names mean, which baffled me for the longest time.) Thefirst couple of times I visited I just didn't bother for that long.

However I figured that lots of sites I now use daily aren't the most intuitive (like LJ) at first, and yet I cope. That is especially true if they come with their own slang that differs from what I'm used to. Like at first I assumed the "friends" feature was your watchlist because it is like that in LJ, but no, they call the updates you want to get actually watching. I have no real idea yet what the friends thing over there does, but it's a good example how learning the idiosyncrasies of one site made another harder for me. And unlike some other sites DA so far hasn't crashed my browser, at least.

What I can recommend as tips if you should ever want to take another stab at it, is reading the part of the wiki article that explains all the major stuff in principle to find what's what and see which functions you want to use. Another thing that worked for me is to ignore most of the clutter and all the things I had no idea what they are at first (I still don't know half), and focus on the central functionality once I found it.

Like to either watch things and add them to your favorite gallery or to upload suff or change your settings, you don't need the row of buttons with "shop channel collections chat more" at all. Really, I think selective perception is key.