The first design of DG... |
Dream-Grafix was started as a school project by 3 people, but Ayame found it to
be so much fun that she took over the entire site by herself after the project
was finished and published it officially for the web.
The first design of DG was created around april 24th 2003 and was very
different to what it looks now. It was a basic photoshop design cut into pieces
and stuck into a table. There was no intention in expanding at first so the
design was rather 'tight' Yet it looked very nice all put together.
As there was no room for expanding on that design, but growing into a bigger
community was one of Ayame's priorities, the first thing she did was redesign
the site. For this redesign frames were chosen as a building brick for the
site, but that was soon cancelled out for the next version, as it gave a lot of
problems with search engines and linking.
Around the 26th of June 2003 the new site was launched, with an accompanying
forum, bringing a lot more opportunities to the community. Also Superman,
Ayame's boyfriend, was officially part of the site now. He had always been
there in the background, helping with designs and suggesting things, but never
officially. He got the position of Global Moderator on the Forum.
Soon a lot of members from the old Animeforum Ayame was on started to join and
brought their friends along. The forum start to really get very active and the
idea of a Dream-Grafix webcomic got started by a couple of forummembers. After
a couple of link exchanges and getting lucky for getting in touch with the
right people in the game mania who brought along a lot of new members (you know
who you are ^_^) the place was getting really crowded.
The success of Dream-Grafix lead to the start of the monthly newsletter. In the
newsletter you would find out all about things going on around Dream-Grafix,
but also a forummember got to talk about the site and the forum, artworks to
see were promoted, FAQs were answerred, statistics were show, etc etc.
Around the end of april Dream-Grafix got a huge publicity boost as the Ezine
Woodworks (Official Ezine of ElfWood.com) published a review on DG on the
frontpage of their April 2004 issue. A lot of Elfwood artists came to
Dream-Grafix (for which Ayame is still very greatful, we'll never forget
Woodworks' support!) and the Fantasy section really flourished.
Yet a lot of questions started to appear. 'Why can't we comment under the
artworks ourselves?' 'Why can't we view all of the artist's artworks in the
same profile?' 'Why do I have to submit my mail and website every single time?'
and so on and so on. This cried out for some more sophisticated coding.
After thinking about it for a long time, it was decided that the new version of
DG would be an ASP.NET version, with login, comment options and so on and so
on.
Designing was the first part. The new DG had to look fresh, modern but
appropriate for all sections.
Also DG was getting a lot of new sections: Realism, CGI, Photograpgy, Comic and
Science-Fiction artworks were added. After creating the design the hard part
came: making the site itself.
A LOT of coding and time went into that but Ayame is very happy with the
result. It's not 100% perfect and bugfree, but she put her all into this site
and made it work to the demands of the people. Its most important features are
the commenting system, improved voting system and the abilities to select
favourites. Of course there's a lot more to the site than these features, but
you have to find that out for yoruself, scouting through the site!
What the future will bring for DG? No one can be sure. Someday Ayame would like
to offer purchasing some of the original artworks online, but that's not for
anytime soon and would only happen if there is a demand for it. Maybe there
will be more merchandise than a Dream-Grafix T-shirt, but nothing's for sure
yet.
For the time being, Ayame and Superman will keep trying to improve the site and
if you want to do them a favor: just spread the word!
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