Why art sites suck
I'm posting this list of perceived failings of art websites to help brainstorm some ideas to overcome these limitations. This post is generally directed at FurAffinity, but some of this applies to DeviantArt and others as well.
Don't make me poll. For me, this is the most annoying aspect about the current generation of art websites. I'd like to ( Read more... )
Don't make me poll. For me, this is the most annoying aspect about the current generation of art websites. I'd like to ( Read more... )
This is an excellent idea if I'm understanding it correctly. Do you mean you want to be able to subscribe to automated searches on new submissions that hit your search terms basically, and have them added to some kind of queue for you? Doing this correctly will require some thought, it can be done, and it's an excellent idea... I'd mostly been focusing easier browsing and searching, so far.
Don't make thumbnails so tiny.
Lumping these two together as they're cross-related. Not being able to see the details of things because thumbnails are so tiny, which ends up allowing for 'custom' thumbnails which just makes things even less browse-able, is the core problem of both of these. Grouping options will be part of the browsing view.
And some people love music and flash animations. Simple checkboxes for default file types to filter for/against on media-attached posts are planned for.
Heh... I was actually taking it one step further: Submissions and Journals are no longer different. Submissions just have a media-file attached to the journal, various metrics and personal preferences to decide it's presentation, etc. The specific equations/checks haven't been fixed yet, but they'll be based on the client's browser width/height visible on common screen resolutions.
Core design idea for this new website, trying to encourage these instead of long, drawn-out descriptions. And yes, users will be able to suggest additional tags and flag tags as inappropriate for a piece. Promotion game mechanics (game theory has to deal with griefers, it's just the term I use) haven't been decided yet.
Site navigation.
My personal book I swear by to this day as it's still relevant (thanks in large part to covering screens from 640x400 up to 1920x1200 when such were just becoming available, and the low-end still around thanks to netbooks) is Homepage Usability by Jakon Nielson & Marie Tahir. I don't have the homepage-banner logo at hand, but it won't be larger than about 5500 pixels total. And yes, it will have an option to be flat replaced with a simple text link back to the homepage.
Heh... The Gryphon Builder website I built for LizKay is the type of responsiveness and loading-feedback honesty I aim for with any and all websites I code on.
I'm from the shareware days and I know that nagware never worked then. It doesn't work now. I didn't mind the previous-FA's scheme of 3 furry-related (artists open for commission, furry webcomic, new conventions, etc) ads over on the left side that were smaller than the picture thumbnails and well below all the navigation components. The new scheme made me block the entire ox.furaffinity.net domain
The 'auto-search new submissions and alert me in realtime' is honestly one obvious idea that's justifiable versus, say, a daily or weekly digest of your automated search results to reduce server load by only running the query off-hours instead of realtime.
This one is actually also directly planned for the website as it is. You can attach multiple pseudonym/public usernames to one global handle, and rename them instead of having to get a new friggin' acocunt, switch between them freely and set up your 'default' pseudonym on login to any of them, and preferences layer between global handle, pseudonym, and login session so you can change an option just for one device without having to set up a custom pseudonym just to do so, for example.
So, yes, if you set up your 'primary/on-login' pseudonym as 'Safe For Work' settings, you can set up a seperate 'In My Knickers' pseudonym so it'll be around two clicks (give or take one) to switch pseudonyms.
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