We were finally able to recently launch our new site design for http://blendercookie.com as well as our other education sites in the Cg Cookie Network. We hope you have had a chance to head over to view the new features.
With the launch behind us we are now able to focus on the next web project… Updating Blender Artists.
It has been a long time coming and we are very anxious and excited to give the site some much needed love. With some new features, look, and accessibility.
In prep for which features should be focused on and which ones should not have focus, below is a prepared feedback form link to help steer it in the right direction.
Right now having attachments on the site is a bit cumbersome and eats up a bit of bandwidth on the server. We were contacted by Minus to see if they could help or integrate them more into Blender Artists. Obvious pro for them is more traffic to their service, and Pro for BA would “possibly” be a cleaner way to integrate images. The drag and drop thing was pretty neat… But having said that we like to look at both sides as well.
Cons may be that we would be leaning on a 3rd party service to serve the images, and have less ability to work with. Feature images, galleries etc…
Definitely up in the air and was curious what the community may think.
Well I believe I responded with an “agree” to the Minus part, but really I think you should go with what allows for the best features of this site, and then only if it doesn’t interfere with those see if it helps in bandwidth enough to be worth it.
In my response I talk a bit about what I would really love to see in regards to better contest specific features. seeing as this place tends to be a center for that no mater the site. And from the sounds of what you just said, using Minus would not be a good match for the features I’d like to see.
Roughly I’d like to see a seperate type of post that is a contest entry, stickied to a contest gallery type thing separate of the contest discussion, which could be updated by the poster, a small description area below, a place for voting/results to be shown, and then a place for comments on just that image.
but then I’m sure this idea needs some solid revision and discussion, and besides, Minus might would work just fine for it.
A one-click way of thanking posters for their useful post would be nice, helping to reduce “Thank you” posts. And as I’ve said before, the “Remember me” checkbox when you log on should be ticked by default. That’s it - thanks for a wonderfully useful forum!
I sent a submission, but you need to add a checkbox stating “I do not want to receive any email blah blah blah” because if I receive yet more crap from sites I will shoot myself…
I’d say a banner showing best work of the month is a nice touch.
What else i’d like to see is the commercials at the bottom of the site, not at the top. But i’ll keep dreaming
I really agree with Atom here. Keep it simple.
And quite frankly, I would leave it as it is.
Personally I am not too happy with the new Blender Cookie, to me it looks like it is drowned in new features (most of them I don’t need) and therefore looks very cluttered now, especially compared to what it looked like before.
I hope this won’t happen to Blender Artists…
I kind of miss the blendernation news feed that used to be in the sidebar, other than that, maybe a button if users find a post to be helpful, like in Conceptart.org, and a way to filter searches by that might be nice for noobs, but do they even use the search?
Also, add a reputation system. So that people could thank each other, and +rep members who are helpful and submit wonderful content, and -rep members who cause chaos, flame wars, and havoc.
