A new "Gallery Tour" area

[sensei]

One of the concerns I had before the Beta Open House was how broad my collection had become. It was simply getting difficult to navigate through my RS site. In Jan/Feb 2007 I tried generating a "Gallery Tour" that would let people browse through one area, see a sample image from each separate section, then link to it if they were interested. But that quickly grew to 80-some pages, too many to be really helpful.

Anyhow, after I got some helpful feedback from the first Betarians to visit during the Open House, I got the radical idea of condensing the tour to one page per series (with a lot of links), and one page of thumbs total. It took a while to figure out how to do the links the way I wanted them, but in the end I worked it out, and
the new, improved "Quick Gallery Tour" is now live.

It was an interesting experiment, as I found that for series I was just learning about, I'd included good information about the plot and its creators, but for "old favorites," I'd just dumped visitors in cold, with no context to help them. Well, with CCS that probably didn't matter (48 of my 50 top visited cels are from this series). But for others, like Magic Knight Rayearth and Tenshi ni Narumon, people probably did need to know a bit about why the art was worth looking at.

As I put together these new notes, I was surprised at how often I kept finding little threads that tied together series that I liked: MKR and VPM were directed by the same person; one of the Tonde Buurin directors created the story concept for TnN and directed the series, and the character designers for the two series were the same; another Tonde Buurin director later did several episodes for Mushishi. And so on.

Anyhow, it was a major learning experience for me, both about myself and the larger world of the anime profession. Please, if you have a chance, give it a look and see what you think.

[Mat4226]

Wow, great idea with the mini tour! Having navigated your gallery blindly versus with the mini tour, I'd say this is much easier. Good work and thanks to all who brought about this new feature! ^_^

[ReiTheJelly]

A wonderful new look for your QGT.

[Grico]

Hmm, I like the tour, very informative.

[funshine]

I like the new mini tour! haven't had time to fully browse it all, but what i've seen has been great, which is what i expected.

[Blaster]

I found the new Quick Tour to be very easy to browse through, and it was also very informative. Nice work Sensei

[sensei]

Thanks to all who tried it out. My thinking was to try to replace a "2D" tour, where visitors, like points on a 2-dimensional line, had to walk through the gallery one title at a time, with a "3D" tour, where you could scroll down and get a glimpse of all the galleries at one glance, then move into one and again see all the sub-galleries at a single glance.

True, if it's a new addition, the present gallery gets you to it in two clicks (1. Boldfaced gallery, 2. the cel/sketch marked "NEW"). And if you arrive knowing what you want to look at, the list of the galleries in the sidebar tries to be intuitive, so you can again be looking at art that interests you in two clicks (1. Gallery of series you like, 2. Individual cel/sketch)

But one thing I got out of the Open House is how much anime there is out there being collected, and how relatively few galleries have an emphasis similar to mine. So for these collectors, who don't watch or know much about (say) "Hyper Police" or "Saiyuki," the four-click "3D" path might actually be more efficient. (1. Gallery Tour, 2. Interesting-looking series, 3. Interesting-looking gallery, 4. Individual cels/sketches.)

I dunno: as I approach a period of time when I'm going to be working on improving my gallery vs. adding to my collection, I thought that something better than the old "I've updated, so visit my gallery" incentive was needed.

Thanks again to all the people who stopped by.