InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Will you be my friend?"

red_eft (red_eft) wrote,
@ 2007-08-20 20:46:00

Current mood:	neurotic
Current music:	Folsom Prison Blues- Johnny Cash

I'm working on the website- and, incidentally, how much do I love that CSS means that I can just start with the content and pretty it up later? So, so much. Nested tables, be gone from my sight! Or site, as it were. In any case, I'm coming upon my eternal dilemma that hits me whenever I try to get my art into a collective, which is to say- how do I *organize* it? Chronologically? By medium? By character? By character seems to make the most sense, considering that most fans are probably more likely going to look for 'all pictures of Tim' versus 'all ballpoint pen sketches', but... what about people I only have one picture of? Do they get their own page with one lonely image? Do I file them under miscellaneous? What if there's more than one person in the shot? Do I file group shots separately? But then, that kind of misses the point of being able to find all pictures of one character in one place. I could categorize by series- so groups of Batfolk could all be on the same page, but then there's the inevitable crossover. Would a hypothetical shot with Tim and Kon and Cass be Bats, or YJ/TT? Should I just have a link to it in each category? That seems ridiculously redundant.

The whole thing makes my brain itch. Organizing problems could be solved by going with medium or chronology, but that seems to be more for my convenience than for the viewers, and then I get twitchy about *that* and-

-yeah, is it any wonder my non-fannish website's been under construction for five years?

(Post a new comment)

ratcreature
2007-08-21 04:12 am UTC (link)

If you have a lot of art, maybe it's worth looking into gallery system with tags or something like that, allowing you to display it in various, flexible ways without having to code everything? And something tagged "bruce, tim" would show up in displays for both tags. I once looked into them for my site, and the setup didn't seem harder than for a blog system, unfortunately both galleries I looked at wanted some Apache module to work that my extra cheap webhost hadn't installed.

As a user I rather like sorting by date for art, because you can easily find the new stuff if you revisit and see the artist progress if you visit for the first time, though subdivisions by fandoms or within DC maybe by families (you know, all Batman-related, all Superman, all Green Arrow, all Titans and so on) are good if there's a lot of art.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	red_eft 2007-08-21 06:47 am UTC (link)
	I thought of tags, but I'm not sure if my host supports the galleries, actually, and they kind of scare me. The point about chronology is a good one, though. notes (Reply to this) (Parent)

	thete1 2007-08-21 04:33 am UTC (link)
	I agree with RC -- tagging the character names, then having a list of tags would work really well for me as a viewer. And, I think definitely organize (within the tags) by date, since that's how I like to view them. (AND I AM ALL IMPORTANT. snort) Seriously, viewing by date makes me feel like I'm getting to know both art and artist. (Reply to this) (Thread)

red_eft
2007-08-21 06:56 am UTC (link)

nnf. The programming needed for tags kinda scares me. Plus the gallery set-up kind of gives me less control over what the pages *look* like, though I suppose *something* has to give here. *kicks perfectionist tendencies*

I do think I'm going to sort by date in *some* fashion, though, because of what you and RatCreature bring up, and also because I can shove all of my old lousy stuff towards the back. (The problem with going through all my old drawings is that I start noticing everything I've done wrong and wanting to pretend they don't exist. *shoves them under the bed*)

(Reply to this) (Parent)