I'm looking for comments about the layout, efficiency, information architecture, etc. on http://www.animewallpapers.com . The goals of the website are:

(1) provide anime desktop wallpapers to our visitors in an efficient manner

(2) make money so we can eat :)

Is this your first attempt? It looks brilliant, very neat and tidy. Good work, I have a sneaky feeling that if you posted on the anim newsgroups (politely!) and told them about your new site (avoiding spamming) then you'd get a lot of customers - I know a friend who is into anime, so I'll forward him to your site..

Just one question though, how are you fixed on copyright for the images? Do you own the images, or are you being given permission to show them.

Lee.

:)

> Is this your first attempt? It looks brilliant, very neat and tidy.

This is the second version of our website. The first one (still visible at http://old.animewallpapers.com for the moment) was launched in July 2000. We've since streamlined it to be more efficient: got rid of that big header graphic for space reasons
replaced affiliate website buttons with text links to speed loading/take up less space
made the series list accessible from the main page
gave the series list two columns so that it would fit on the screen without having to scroll> Good work, I have a sneaky feeling that if you posted on the
> anim newsgroups (politely!) and told them about your new
> site (avoiding spamming) then you'd get a lot of customers

Doh. I never thought of newsgroups back when I did a lot of promotion for the site. I did link exchanges, search engine submissions (we get tons of traffic from Yahoo and Google, being ranked highly for the reasonably popular search phrase "anime wallpaper"), directory submissions but forgot about newsgroups. Thanks for reminding me.

> Just one question though, how are you fixed on copyright for
> the images? Do you own the images, or are you being given
> permission to show them.

We don't have ownership/permission of the images; they belong to the companies that make the anime in Japan. In general they let people just display their images, as it is free publicity for them, and many anime websites do this.

hey phillip :)

i like the new design.. although i did like seeing my button on your site hehe ;) but understand the need for speed as i did the same too :)

i stay away from newsgroup posting cause it ain't the kind of fans i am looking for - be very picky about the ngs you choose..

personally i like to read the site updates on the left hand side of the page rather than the right..

the forum is a great addition to the site although i think the forum should be a colour scheme more closer to the site :)

> i like the new design.. although i did like seeing my button
> on your site hehe ;) but understand the need for speed as i
> did the same too :)

Yeah... I figure one major advantage that AnimeWallpapers.com has over many other anime graphic websites is that the HTML is coded efficiently so that things load quickly. Most webmasters don't understand this. I am proud to report that http://www.animewallpapers.com loads in just 4 seconds on a 56k modem. The series index pages load the HTML in 2 seconds, and then the thumbnail images in another 9 seconds. Would have preferred it to be under 10 seconds, but if I make the images smaller then they're not detailed enough... (hmm, I just noticed that the images are 95% quality; I could cut their size in half at little cost if I reduced them to 75% quality)

Reference: "The Need for Speed" by Jakob Nielsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703a.html

> i stay away from newsgroup posting cause it ain't the kind of
> fans i am looking for - be very picky about the ngs you
> choose..

I don't understand... What's wrong with the kind of fans on newsgroups?

> personally i like to read the site updates on the left hand
> side of the page rather than the right..

The advantage of having the navigation links on the right hand side is that (1) they're closer to the scrollbar so it's easier to move the mouse to it, and (2) like you said, people start reading from the left. However, people *expect* the navigation links to be on the left hand side because it's so common that way, so I have to put it there too so that people can find it easily.

Reference: "When Bad Design Becomes the Standard" by Jakob Nielsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991114.html

> the forum is a great addition to the site although i think the
> forum should be a colour scheme more closer to the site :)

We haven't thought much about the color scheme. The forum was kind of setup in a hurry... I'll suggest that to the graphics guys though.

[Edited by pmak1 on 02-03-2001 at 05:27 AM]

I don't entirely agree with the image that newsgroup readers aren't the poeple you want to target. I search Google.com then Dejanews.com whenever I'm searching on the net for anything, 8 times out 10 (literaly) I find what I'm looking for on Dejanews.com faster than with google.com - after all when I want an answer to webhosting issues I look in here now because I'm likely to find exactly what I'm looking for without having to plow through pages of links to porn and other unrealated dribble...

Most people i've recommended search on Dejanews.com have been very impressed indeed. So don't knock it too much!

:D

Lee.