Main | Arcane Implementation » September 17, 2004

Conjuring Up OPi8.com

It was a little less than a year ago that Chad Michael Ward officially abdicated OPi8.com to me. Bills had been paid, DNS records redirected, a half dozen email addresses broken. I had adopted a dying site and my first task was to veneer it so that the desolate landscape it was presenting appeared populated again. I needed to make the site look alive, even when it wasn't, even when the site's content explored the dark, desolate side of human nature, including death.

I made an effort emailing everyone I could think of to let them know that the site was now "under new management." A good amount of those emails bounced, their intended recipients no longer using the addresses I had. Most of the apparently delivered messages were never replied to. Only a handful of individuals got back to me in regards to their previous roles on the site and whether they wanted to continue in them.

I am very grateful to those few. What's the point of a site without an audience anyway? I didn't want to turn OPi8.com into a fringe vanity site, especially since it held a good amount of prestige in a certain sector of art and comics culture. OPi8.com is a promotion site, geared toward making artist's work known to a wider audience. Of course that means that the site better be good to its users, many of which are the artists the site promotes.

After a couple months of playing with the design the previous web mistress, Josie Nutter, left as her legacy at the site, I realized I'd have more fun rebuilding the site from scratch. The site looked nice enough, but the output code (the HTML) was inefficient and "quirky." There were lots and lots of tables and lots and lots of images, all of which slowed down load time even though their purpose was obviously to present a static design across most current-generation browsers. The PHP code and MySQL database wasn't bad, and going through Josie's PHP I filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of that particular scripting language.

So I resolved to make a "standards-based," accessible, and usable design built using the same basic backend that Mrs. Nutter had originally built.

I ran a preliminary design across Chad Michael Ward, in the intention of keeping his voice active in the site, even if just far behind the scenes. It is after all, his creation. The first design was intended as a complete departure from the previous look of the site. Unfortunately it fell pretty flat. Chad was excited that I was actually working on the site instead of letting it fester, but it was plain that he wasn't entirely impressed with my presentation, yet. I wasn't too impressed either, but he was helpful in letting me know what was working for my design. So I embraced that and moved on. The current navigation on the site is based on that early design. All for progress.

I was inspired to create what I'm calling the "Arcane" theme for the site while researching a piece of fiction and enjoying the etchings and sigils in The Lesser Key of Solomon. This also grew organically out of that preliminary design as well as Josie Nutter's design.

Finally, my favorite element of the design, the masthead, came to me while falling asleep. A sensation I'm sure most creatives are familiar with. The site's primary function is to showcase and promote artists and their work. Why not make the front page a specific outlet of that. Dave Senecal's VISION submissions worked perfectly as a source for the first masthead of the new OPi8.com, which also brought me to the new version of "Featured" content. A monthly look at a new contributor, whose work or illustration of their work (for WORD creators) would find a place on the masthead, bringing back OPi8.com's original periodical approach (to a point).

In the next column I'll outline more of the specific challenges and happy accidents that went into the implementation of the "Arcane" theme and the site's new markup.

Posted by Anderson at September 17, 2004 04:36 PM

Comments

Interesting move Travis, almost on a par with the Cohen brothers writing about writers block for Barton Fink.

Hang in there and keep the Black flag flying.

Thank you.
You fucking compare me to the Cohen brothers one more time though . . . and I'll fucking hug you.
They're genius.