Ask HN: Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my site Artevolve - Remix and Derive Artwork/Photographs

alpha.artevolve.com

25 pointsdryicerx15 comments

I click this link and see a wall of text. Bullet-y text to be sure, but text. I don't even think to scroll down to see the artwork below the fold. My eyes don't really read your text; they're just looking for some indication of something I can click on to actually see the thing. They find "browse"; I click that, and now I'm actually in your app, and I'm thinking "what-the-hell, why isn't this the first thing I see when I visit the site?"

Long story short: find another way to organize the front page of the site. You picked a niche where you get to put pretty pictures on your site. They need to be the first thing I see.

Ah yes, I just applied a new design with the info and thumbnails side by side, hopefully solving this problem. A good lesson for me (I am just getting started with the web design and ui aspect of things). Thanks!

The site looks great. It's very clean, which I love.

One of the things I would do is split the main page into left and right and move the "Recent Artwork" to the right of bullet point list on the left. This will let prospective users see artwork right away and you don't really lose anything since there isn't much content in the bullet points anyway.

Also, I would lose the captcha for the signup until you have a spam user signup problem. No point in giving people another obstacle to signup if you don't have to. I would lose the "password again" field also as I've never really liked it.

Good luck.

Thanks! Those are some great ideas, already applied your advice on the signup form and captcha, this is a excellent point.

I agree about the front page content as well. I'm playing with the design now trying to get them fit nicely. Not being a web designer, this is going to be a joyful :)

I think that your design would be much more successful if it were more visually content-centric. Focus on 1-3 of the best images (I guess based on your voting system) to show off on the front page. "Finally a Home for your Creative Work!" is too generic. It forces me to read each paragraph below to know what's going on. Try explaining the site in a few bullet points reinforced with descriptive and visually appealing icons. If you try that stuff out I think it would also positively influence the flow of the rest of the site.

Yeah, the tag line is just a place holder for not having something better, need to brainstorm harder...

The content concentric idea with a few images is definitely a good one. I was thinking of something like TED.com where things are tiled, but with bigger images, but hopefully will get to that once I finish developing the core features within the site. Really appreciate you input!

Just a side project I just hacked in the last few days. Think of it as Github, except for artwork. You can use it to store your creative stuff, but also to fork and derive from other users and the site tracks the derivative/fork tree.

Example of derivatives http://alpha.artevolve.com/art/view/321667ea2e7a4db4a2089802...

By the way this is still Alpha as still a lot to be done

I would introduce a sidebar to the art profile page so people can get an idea of what surrounds that piece (derivatives, ownership, etc) without having to scroll down.

When you've developed it a bit more, make sure that in between the click from art profile to evolve an image, there is something other than a sign-up form. You need to show the potential to new users before they will sign-up. As it is now, the majority would see the sign-up and walk away.

Make sure your example derivative is really convincing. Not sure if your market is professionals (who might do this in Lightroom or Aperture), groups (wanting to share professional derivatives privately) or people creating lolcats and so on, but your example for each case should be quite different.

Excellent idea regarding the art page, I'll definitely need to redo that page.

I already applied your suggestion for art submitting/evolving page, I can definitely see it attracting more people that way by showing the guts.

Really appreciate your input! :)

I would have to say the only thing that bugs me is the many different font styles and colors. I'm not feeling the #B55008. Just giving you my meaningless opinion. :)

Now that you mention it, I can see the many fonts not mixing well too. Do you have any suggestions regarding the color?

Is there any way to search or filter by tag? Right now you can just look through all the photos, but once you have more photos it would be nice to be able to filter them.

Yup you can, http://alpha.artevolve.com/arts?tag=moped I haven't included it in to general usage yet because there still some kinks.

I also plan on making it so the source artwork's tags will also trickle down to derivatives works and etc.

I think you should left align the introduction texts and title on the homepage.

Also it is not clear if everything on the page is 'recent artwork' or not.

Ah good idea, noted. For the moment since there aren't that many submissions, it's the most recent work, but once I get enough submissions, hope to only display a couple of 'features' or 'top voted' images.

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