www.danielcarey.co.uk

I finally got round to creating danielcarey.co.uk using indexhibit,a program which uses the basic template of sidebar and main page which is well-suited to displaying artwork and especially work in progress. It took a long time just to get my head around php and find a suitable web host; I decided on hostmonster.com because of the absence of bandwidth and capacity limits

Dog Site

The main problem with the Black Dogs website is that it is built on a foundation laid down when I didn’t know the first thing about web design. Simon Lewandowski had given msyelf and few other fine art people a crash course on the very basics of using dreamweaver, and I seem to remember him teaching us how to do simple gifs as well. I did a gif of some characters from streetfighter 2 dancing about and it was all a bit shit.

The first version of the site was used to advertise the Arte et Labore show; it was entirely text-based (although I seem to remember adding the image of Andy’s fussball table afterwards) and set in different sizes of arial, so about as simple as a site can possibly get. For visitors it relied on people typing in the address from the invites and posters.

By the time Technically Wrong came around I had replaced the site with a new version which incorporated a menubar and lots of images. It took me a while to realise this was awful because of the prevalance of grey (it looked like an accountancy website) and all the images were tiny (expandable) thumbnails surrounded by reams of text. When I came to design the third and current incarnation of the site I kept the largely red and black colour scheme but discarded pretty much everything else.

I think the current site is reasonably well-designed, easy to navigate (but also easy to get lost in) and I’ve had positive feedback about the amout of information accessible in it, and the increase in the number and size of images has made the site far more useful and attractive.

The problem I have updating it now is that when I came to design this version I knew nothing about templates, something unbelievably basic which would make large-scale changes an utter nightmare as I wold have to change every single page manually. No doubt at some point I will make a fourth version of the site which incorporates templates, forms etc but there seems to be little sense in doing that at the moment as I have so much other stuff to do and the site works fine as it is.

I spent a few hours last night doing basic maintenance and updates whilst watching Indiana Jones. The Axis Consequences games are the main addition. I’m struggling with the front page – the interview section always opens in expanded rather than collapsed mode, and it seems daft to hit people with a lot of text as soon as they get to the site. The Agenda page looks a bit better with the new dividing border between sections, although I’d still like to make a version that doesn’t require any scrolling.

www.black-dogs.org

Black Dogs meeting 14.03.08

Lots of discussions at the latest meeting, a good deal of conversation and debate about how the group should progress, promote itself and the “idea” of BD, centring on the website as the first port of call to newcomers.

Andy and Dave in particular felt that there were a number of ways we can suggest to people that BD is more than just us six people, and thus promote the understanding that it goes beyond our individual work. We agreed to change the “about” page of the site (and to make this the index, for the time being at least). Other redesigns were suggested including how to make the agenda page more readable. The site needs a major overhaul but until I have a chance to sit down and work it all out it’ll have to be minor changes here and there.

The Consequences game on the Axis site www.axisweb.org/consequences is working fine although there are a number of changes necessary – the main criticism being that we seem to be losing participants because of the “try again later” message which comes up when an image or text is waiting approval. These problems will hopefully be rectified before the next game.