As times goes on, things change: Rant about the internet and my website2005! Seven years ago since I re-worked this current version of Organic Metal! I'm now one of the small minority of internet artists out there who have been maintaining a personal website for several years without letting it run into the ground or the domain name expire (Yay me!  Screen Shot of the OM Splash page Why fix it if it's not broken? I've been adding and tweaking OM since it was created in an attempt to make it a little more user-friendly, a little more visually appealing and a little more bug-free. It's been great  and it's now looking and performing the best it's ever been! Although:A) There are so many new web technologies one can use to make sites work better now. For example- There are dozens of amazing, fancy, pre-made image galleries, pre-made templates, content management systems and design solutions which have been refined and improved over the years by 1000s of web experts. Despite me adding some fancy touches to what has become a pretty meaty personal website, many of these are a little out of date and users (myself included) expectations of good design and usability have increased. Not that my site was ever plagued with an over-abundance of tacky animated gifs or poorly aligned Times New Roman fuchsia pink text on standard flat blue page background like so many sites in the late 90s/early 00s! Also, originally I created images for every title header on the site- there's probably about 60 of these images on the site and if I need to edit them all, it can take hours. However using CSS3 I can upload the title font and apply an outer glow to the text without needing to mess around by creating dozens of individual image files. This also helps massively with SEO and getting the site noticed by Google searches. B) Being found on the internet is now an art in itself. OM used to be ranked pretty high on Google search results a few years back, then it seemed to get black-listed for a while. I made a few content tweaks and eventually got most of it back in the rankings, but it's not a site which follows the new 'Rules of the Internet' and hence, isn't nearly as easy to find. The rule now is relevance- there's billions of sites out there and people aren't prepared to sift through heaps of text. They want to search for then extract info from relevant sites as quickly as possible. Such has given rise to a blog boom, micro sites, or more basic mini-foloi sites which give users concise, basic info on very specific or niche topics. OM houses my artwork, in-depth personal info, tutorials, examples of my professional work and the ability for users to interact with the site by adding comments to the art, blog posts and dropping a public message in the guest book. This is great! But I realize most visitors don't want all that. It's too much info on too many topics and laid out too inconveniently so visitors go elsewhere to find more specific content which caters for their needs. Even new best friends I make aren't prepared to read through even half of my site's content! Instead, fans or friends want something like Facebook, Deviantart or Twitter- a chance to keep up to date with little snippets of info in a format and structure they recognise, or potential business partners just want a professional portfolio without knowing 100s of irrelevant facts like what I keep under my bed or my top 20 favourite movies! It's not broken, but it's out of date. OM is a project I have loved working on and want to keep alive for as long as possible. However it's a site over-populated with arguably irrelevant content for the typical, new-internet-age visitor. Due to it's original design and nature, it's hard to find on web searches, and hence only receives 10% of visits it used to in 2005 and IMO, not even 1% of the visits it deserves. There are further modifications I would like to implement to the site to make it better. For example, this blog page alone could use an RSS feed, ability to add posts to social bookmarks, add images for every entry (to break up text) of which are sized and aligned uniformly by a CMS, more search engine friendly, the layout needs some work, It could use categorizing, tagging etc like Wordpress or Blogger and more!. However it would be easier to simply use Wordpress for this blog! And while I was at it, I might as well use Wordpress of a similar existing CMS structure to re-design my site around which would give me a ton more tried and tested usability features. Organic Metal's Fate It'll be around in it's current form for a long while yet both for my own satisfaction and for the pleasure of the 5000 visitors each month who do manage to find one of it's pages lurking around on the net! I wish that figure had a few more zeros on the end of it- It would be nice to have a few more user opinions on my ramblings and the artwork I post, or a few more job offers come in through the site. I realize if I want hits, the next step is to develop a series of small/micro sites- More simplistic, 3-6 page, highly ranked brochure-like sites with more relevant and concise content. They will be fun projects to think about at some point  After they're up and running, OM will probably end up existing as an archive site/project (like now!) and if I were to update it, I'd only add a few artworks here and there, maybe a blog entry or two. I can't see myself writing any new tutorials for the site, re-opening the forum or editing/updating any of the current content and graphics. I wont have the time, inclination and there wont be much demand for it from visitors anyway. It'll simply exist a testament to the good old days
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) IMO in this internet age a website should be re-vamped once every one to three years so I'm a little bit behind! But have no intention of sitting down to re-design Organic Metal version 3...reid writes: |
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ah cool ill be you first vewer, cant wait. yah | |
Ben writes: |
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Hey Justine. I can't remember that tutorial. I think WP is a great tool for amateur web design, although I'm used to working with Dreamweaver exclusively. If you want to create an image like the scrolling header on Organic Metal, perhaps check out Adobe Flash and relevant tutorials on youtube or something? Hey Reid. Yeah, I'm going to post some videos showing my working process on Youtube at some point using time lapse photography and screen capture software. It's not something I've done before and just waiting until I get a few days spare to look into it -Ben | |
reid writes: |
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hi, ben I was wondering.. could you post you tube videos(you dont have to talk) because I am extremely keen of your arkwork, and would like to learn though video. I know you are extremely busy but I am sure you would be extremely good at it. I would love it if you could and least considure this, your greatest follower. reid | |
Justine writes: |
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Hi, nice artwork. I found your site via the Adobe tut. abt editing a WP theme using Dreamweaver. I am still not convinced WP is the best for graphic design/Dreamweaver afficionados. Could you possibly point me in the direction of how to create a similar img on L, overlay the scrolling header. Many thanks. | |
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