busybee fluffy rambles

I keep on saying that I will work on my comics next, because I now have a nice place for posting them that isn’t annoying to maintain, but after last night’s drawing group I got some feedback from folks who were incredibly focused on nitpicky bits about the site layout, even though I made it quite clear that I’m still working on it and that it’s the CMS itself I was trying to demonstrate. But, you know. First impressions and all that.

So, the main things I’ve worked on is improving the mobile experience, namely finally setting the <meta name="viewport"> stuff, and also adding a few more responsive CSS queries where appropriate. I also finally learned to love flexbox since that helped me out in a couple of spots too.

I’ve also finally started to build the actual front page, since, well, again, first impressions and all that.

Obviously there’s a lot more to finish on there — half of the category tiles don’t have art at all, most of the art that is there is just a placeholder (I definitely plan on replacing music and food, and art probably could use something more colorful/current), and the overall color scheme needs massive improvement — but this is actually approaching the state of usability and looking pretty decent. Not great, but serviceable. Okay, mediocre.

I suppose I should bring a title bar back in at some point, too. Hmm.

For reference, here’s how the old front page looked:

I think I’d rather have the “latest things” box be at the bottom, and I’ll definitely be bringing back the title bar. I’m not so sure about the subtle paper grain in the background. I also feel like I have way too many link buttons in that sidebar right now. Which ones do people think are vital and which ones can be gotten rid of? I feel like Tumblr is inessential (since I only use it as a place to crosspost content from here anymore) and both Bandcamp and Soundcloud are discoverable directly from the music page. Itch is similarly discoverable from the games page.

I guess a better question to ask is: what are the essential ones to keep? Probably Patreon, RSS, Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and Twitch; those are ones that don’t have any direct discovery path from related content on the site. I might want to keep GitHub as well.

I dunno, this whole entry just feels like a bunch of navel-gazing right now. I also think I should be in bed.

Oh well. Progress is incremental, right?