With close to 180,000 visitors a month, this site has seen a lot of growth in the past few years. Because of this growth, there were a couple of features and updates that have needed some attention to help improve navigation and accessibility. I’m constantly thinking about how to evolve and simplify things while remaining true to this blogs original intent. These are small changes, but steps that I feel have a lot of potential.
1. SITE GALLERY – I have created and posted many images since 2009, however there has never been an easy way to view them without searching through a ton of old blog posts. Therefore, I set up a gallery that lays them all out on a single page. If the thumnbnails are clicked, a link is revealed under the image that takes you directly to the corresponding post. This provides a different and hopefully easier way of experiencing the site.
2. USER GALLERY – I consistently have visitors sending me their illustrations, process work, and diagrams. It only made sense to embrace the large and growing community forming around this blog and start a page that aggregates illustrations from around the world. I think there is an opportunity to build a unique gallery that focuses on experimentation, different work-flows, and stuff that has never been seen before. Although there were a few directions I could have taken this, I ultimately decided on a Tumblr site to handle this traffic. I love the simplicity of these sites with their clean interface and beautiful galleries. Note that I have already added some of my own images to get the ball rolling. These will be removed later on. I will also be moderating the submissions so it may take some time before images are uploaded to gallery. You can submit an illustration by going to the Tumblr page and selecting “Submit an Illustration” at the top.
3. TWITTER – I have been putting this off for way too long. Although I am late to the game, I have finally set up a twitter account to offer up another way to keep tabs on this blog. With the kind of numbers this site is getting, it is becoming next to impossible to respond to all of the comments and emails that I recieve on a daily basis. At the same time, I want to try to remain as accessable to all social media platforms as I can. Its a delicate balance of creating content and responding to emails/comments and I’m not sure that I have it figured out yet.
So with that said, I hope to keep growing this site and build on the community that is already here. If you have time, post some architectural illustrations to the new user gallery, get some great exposure, and be sure to follow me on twitter.
Hi,
Itțs realy impressive how you devote your time for the ones like me, that follow your site. Thank you alot, you've been an inspiration for me and i am following this blog closely for improving my skills in landscape architecture drawings and renderings. Cheers!
Thank you Radu
Alex, this is just great! Keep up the good work!!!
finally you tweeted and during my thesis wee hours i use to learn you techniques and now its over also but still i am learning thank you for being so transparent and making us learn you are like a good god teacher to me…
#AWESOMR WORK !!! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!
I've been looking everywhere for that one tutorial where you showed how to clean up excess polylines in Sketchup! You highlighted them and they magically disappeared. I do a lot of file transfers between Revit, Rhino, and Sketchup and adding materials to thousands of little polyshapes in Sketchup is a huge problem for me.
Every time a fellow student whines about their illustrations I direct them to your site for tips. 🙂
Have you ever thought about adding a forum to your blog site?
@ Kevin
Yeah I have. Still playing around with the idea too. Maybe I will do a trial run to see how well it gets picked up
Ehi Alex! The new Gallery feature is wonderful! Always wanted that 🙂
..I tried to comment an image, the post has been registered but it's been published as a caracter with 254grey color, so it's not visible.. Maybe it's a codeing issue for that page.. I just wanted to let you know!
Many many thanks! Your tips are always excellent 😀
Hi Filippo,
Thanks for the heads up. I will look into it.
WE LOVE U ALEX (From IraN) :X:X:X