a poll on website design preferences...

[ratcreature]

I have been wondering about the design of the fanart corner of my website. I don't have that many fanart pieces up, but slowly they have gotten more numerous (okay, so it's not even twenty, but then I'm hardly prolific) and I wondered whether I should somehow split or reorganize the section into subsections.

Right now the images are sorted simply by reverse date, with the newest on top, with a smallish (120x120px) preview next to a detailed description of the piece, all in the fanart section of my page for fandom stuff. So you get any picture with just two clicks from my index page. Obviously the more pictures I add, the longer the page takes to load, because of the previews, but otoh the previews are just about 5-7kb each, so personally I would prefer having all on one page rather than having to click three times to get to the art even for twice as many pictures (which at the pace of my fanart production are unlikely to materialize any time soon), but then my internet connection is moderately fast.

[Poll #817192]

Comments

[ratcreature]

What I favor so far would be either to reorganize all the art on the same page, but with fandom subsections, or to post the newest ten dy date and have additional subpages by fandom for all pictures in each. OTOH I'm not sure how much help subpages really are since most of my fanart is DC anyway. I mean, out of the 17 pictures 9 are DC, 2 DC xovers (one with Marvel, one with SW). 4 HP, 1 Marvel, and 1 SGA/Watership Down x-over. I mean, I probably would do a subpage each for DC, HP and one for xovers (including those with DC) and other fandoms.

If I was really prolific I'd go the route of some dynamic database thingy with flexible search/display options or something, but that's a ridiculous amount of trouble for so few images, not to mention that the web gallery systems I looked into required a setup my webhost isn't configured for, so it's unlikely I'd find something working out of the box that I like, so the effort would be kind of overkill. (It's just I'm disgruntled by huge fanart pages in HP where artist have sometimes hundreds of pictures and they are just sorted by date and I have no way to find anything or just display pictures with my favorite character in them, though it doesn't help that many don't have descriptions with their sometimes not even telling thumbnails. It just makes me grumpy.).

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I know what you mean. A page of 100 thunbnails, with barely distinguishable subjects and no description, drives me crazy. \

Some people are really good about it though, going so far as to categorize by individual character and then further breaking down into line art only and fully colored. But I haven't seen anybody who has as much description as you...i *love* the description you use.