I’m one of the new kids here (albeit a really old kid) and I think the site is terrific. However, I have a suggestion that would (I think) make the site a lot more fun and useful: Add a mechanism for conveniently viewing a blog in its entirety.
I used to blog at Tumblr, where one of the best features was the option of viewing an entire blog, in miniature, on a single page. In a matter of seconds, you could assess its quality and make your decision on whether to follow.
At other sites, a link for each page is provided. If you want to look at page 83, you click the link and there you are. This is not quite so useful, but at least you can keep track of your favorites and return to them when you wish.
Unless I’m wrong (which is entirely possible) there is no way of viewing page 83 of a Patreon blog except by wearing out your clicking finger. Although I have only a handful of patrons, I’m actually hesitant to post my best work because I know that after it slips to page 5 or 6, it will effectively fall off the edge of the earth. Who’s going to do that much clicking?
This problem is especially frustrating for me because I work in a variety of styles. If a viewer doesn’t find what he likes on the first few pages, he’ll have no way of knowing that what he likes is only a page or two away.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Sticks and stones?
I kind of wish we could make it more like a gallery and organize our works into folders to make it easier to find things at a glance and it would be a lot more visually appealing if we could choose a cover for the folders. I do a lot of blah blah blah posts and sometimes there is some scrolling involved to get to the art. We have tags, but you get any amount of work and the list gets overwhelming to anyone other than the creator of the page. Right now I use the featured tags to try to anticipate what a patron/potential patron might want quick access to and I am really grateful for that feature! I wouldn’t mind a few more featured tags though…
I agree about needing a better organizing system. I’ve been using Featured Tags to organize comic pages that I post, but even then there’s still an endless wall that needs to be scrolled through if someone’s looking for a specific page or anything else. I’m personally not very fond of anything that involves endlessly scrolling (ex: an awful lot of Tumblr blogs). Something like a grid view/folder system would be nice.
I went through this dilemma when I setup our Patreon page - how to make everything easily accessible with a few clicks. Although it took a lot of setup, we have achieved something similar. Check out our page for some ideas - Team_Radious
I use google docs to keep our featured tags maintained with proper links and to archive links, commonly used content, and shared community files. It would still be cool to be able to manual organize regular tags into categories or at least sort alphabetically but for now, we feel this type of organization will be easily maintained over time and will be easy to reorganize if/when the Patreon Staff adds new features.
Let me know what you think, always looking for feedback and ideas from other creators
