organization

[ptcoughlin]

It seems that as the list of artists housed in this community grows that it begs the necessity for a way to categorize artists, materials, firings, pots vs. sculpture, figurative vs. abstract, et cetera.  Alphabetical is democratic and all, but it would be great if I could search for all figurative artists or woodfire potters or even woodfire figurative artists.

[June Woest]

How can all the good suggestions be completed without time and money?
Unless there is a plan in place to keep pace with the best technology has to offer for the site, I am concerned the energy we have will falter.  Would a membership fee before or after acceptance be an answer?

[June Woest]

Is it possible to make the default in the forums be "post newest first"?
I'm doing a lot of scrolling due to all the new activity.
Even when I have made that the setting, it changes back.

[renner]

It seems that as the list of artists housed in this community grows that it begs the necessity for a way to categorize artists, materials, firings, pots vs. sculpture, figurative vs. abstract, et cetera.  Alphabetical is democratic and all, but it would be great if I could search for all figurative artists or woodfire potters or even woodfire figurative artists.

What about simply changing the thumbnail image associated with each artist to an image of the art ... not the artist.  Could be a simple way to maintain the alphabetical order and also allow for visitors seek out a 'type' of work at a glance.  

Also ... As the site evolves and changes ...  who is making the changes to the site?  I know all of this takes time.  If help is needed ... collecting, converting images ... or whatever ... I can help ... let me know.

-keith

[thomasgruner]

Hi everyone,

Congrats!

I stumbled across this site a few days ago and really appreciate the work being done to provide a quality online ceramics resource. The design is nice as well, good navigation, clean. It would be nice to have a few categories or search features though, and a thumb of work could be nice as well...

Anyway I am a ceramic artist and professional web developer with about four years of experience and program dynamic portals and multilingual websites generally for hotels. Maybe your are already working on something, but if there is a need to make the site dynamic I would be willing to donate my time to improve the site w/ categories, search, image management, and so on. I can't promise to meet every request, but could take the existing design and add the needed features using best prcactices for web dev.

If you are interested and would like to see examples or throw around ideas, please email me at tom dot gruner at gmail dot com (available for this from jan 15th 2008).

Anyway, congrats on a job well done!