The Retropolis Multi-POD Web Site, Part 1: Design Considerations

Filed under Print On Demand, Web Development

The first in a series of articles that describe how I combined products from several different print on demand companies into a single web site at my own domain.

The design of a web site is always about several things, and only one of those things is "making it pretty". In fact the way you make it pretty all depends on the decisions you’ve made about what the purpose of the site will be (often not as obvious as you might think), what the content will be, how the user will find that content, and how the user will understand where he or she is within the site – and then be able to get elsewhere with as few clicks as you can manage.

The answers to those questions determine the framework within which you will make the site pretty. That’s because these answers tell you what you’re designing. If you leap off to figure out what it’s going to look like without answering those questions first you’re going to end up with something that (presumably) looks great, but whether it does the job it needs to do is left completely to chance.

The Art of Retropolis – all in one place!

Filed under Print On Demand, Web Development, Works in Progress

So… when last we saw our hero, who at that time was me, I was working on the second half of my illustrations for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

Then, to all appearances, I vanished.

Here’s why:

In the annual ramp up to the holiday season – that happy, carefree and yet spiritual time when I turn you upside down and try to shake all the change out of your pockets – I took on a big project that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years.

There are a whole bunch of places on the web where I sell my work, as posters and prints, on the ever-popular t-shirts of the Retropolis Transit Authority and – new, this year – on customizable business cards and other nifty swag at the Retropolis Travel Bureau. The trouble is that although I do cross-link between them, where I’m able, there was no central clearing house for all these different things. A visitor to one would usually not realize that the others existed.

So I’ve just completed that very clearing house: an "Art of Retropolis" site where I combine the products I sell through different vendors so that they’re all available in one spot.

In order to do that I had to combine three different scripts to draw in the products, along with quite a few static pages, in such a way that (I hope) it’s not confusing to the user, and moreover – when the all powerful Googlebot sees it – the site does not look as though someone’s simply scraped existing content from my original online shops. Which is pretty much a death sentence where SEO’s concerned. These two issues were such important and interesting problems that I may write up the project later on.

But for now, IT’S ALIVE!!!!!

If it works as well as I hope it will, I’ll probably do the same thing with my scattered Celtic art shops. Sometime next year.

And Thrilling Tales? I was already aware that creating the illustrations for its first story was taking longer than I’d expected. So its launch – which I’d hoped would happen right about now, or soon after – will be taking place early next year.

Three New Tutorials on Customizing a Zazzle Store

Filed under Print On Demand, Web Development

Two weeks ago I started to set up my first gallery/store at Zazzle; when the powers that be there saw what I was putting on the gallery’s front page they ushered me into the closed beta of their new Store Customization system. I set up a second gallery there this week, and the other night they opened up the beta so everyone could play.

This turned out to be perfect timing for me. I’d had a chance to experiment with a system that was almost ready for release (this means there was documentation!) and which as a result was pretty solid. I’d gone through about a week and a half of trying to figure out how to do the things that just about anyone would want to do and it was all fresh in my mind.

So I wrote up three tutorials at the Zazzle forum, which I’ve retooled a bit and reformatted to post here.

1. Skinning the Zazzle Sidebar

This is a step-by-step tutorial with sample graphics. It shows you how to use three small images, some CSS, and some HTML to change the appearance of your Zazzle sidebar.

2. How to Reorganize Your Zazzle Sidebar

This shows you how Zazzle’s modular elements fit together to build a store’s sidebar, and how you can move those elements around till you like ’em.

3. How to Add a New, Custom Page to Your Zazzle Store

Here’s another step-by-step tutorial that helps you to create an entirely new page, which comes up in the sidebar like any of the standard pages and can contain your own custom content. It’s much easier to do than to explain!

Site Redesign at Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design

Filed under Web Development, Works in Progress

It’s been about four years since I did a redesign at my flagship site, Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design. Till now, anyway. Last night I updated the site with a new look and a wider format layout that will better acommodate the continuously growing content that’s been trying to bust out of the pages.

Over the years, that site’s been laid out to work in a browser window that’s 640 pixels wide (2002), 800 pixels wide (2005), and now 1024 pixels wide (2009). It’s always looked good, but each time it’s looked good, well, better.

I can’t let the width grow until I’m inconveniencing a very small percentage of the site’s visitors. Which is, well, now. I watch the stats on my visitors and I can see that very, very few of them are now running their displays at less than 1024 x 768.

Truth to tell, I’m still tinkering with the new version a bit. But that’s normal.

See what you think!

My Sites – Long Playing Computer Graphics

Filed under Web Development, Works in Progress

My personal web site was, as you’d expect, my first. In its first few years it went through substantial changes – after all, I was learning how to design sites at the time – but around 1999 it settled down and since then I’ve mainly made only visual changes to it. That’s partly because I’d accumulated so many inbound links that I don’t want to make huge changes there any more. Why did I get all those links? Well, because I was giving things away for free. I still do. It’s absurdly easy to give things away, and people like it. And I was used to doing it.