Saturday 19 February 2011

The Accent UK Website Upgrade - Phase 1.

It's been a long time coming but Colin Mathieson, Andy Bloor and I have agreed that it's time to overhaul our website and bring it into the 21st Century. I'd been discussing it with Owen Johnson and had received feedback from Garen Ewing and Martin Flink suggesting that it could be improved, and right they all are.

The first step of the process is this blog. I've been running my own blog for a while now and I like the ease with which it can be maintained, and also the way it drives you to make the whole thing a visual record, rather than just a lot of text.

When it comes to what will become the new Accent UK website however, the first step is to design the look of the thing, and how it will flow. This will drive the decision on what menus to have, and how deep to make it. I like the idea of having more sample pages up there, and there are some nice ways of achieving that these days. Andy Bloor will be designing the look of the website of course, which'll ensure that not only does it look great, but also that it captures the same look and feel as the comics themselves.

It's very early days but Andy has already started to pull some potential screen images together...
and it's shaping up very nicely. We've been in discussions with a web developer, so that once we've sorted out the design we can quickly move into build.

This Blog then will replace the News and Events pages within the original website. I won't be migrating all the old entries across though, it'll just move on from today's entry, so I'll have to see if we can keep the archive material available somehow within the new website, as they do bring back fond memories.

News
A few things to mention;

  1. Diamond have accepted PREDATORS, from the PDF copy, which is a great step forward for us as it means that we can now print closer to the actual number of copies ordered through PREVIEWS.

  2. Voting is still open for this year's EAGLES over at http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/, so if you haven't voted for your favourite titles and creators then nows the time to do so, to make sure that they make it through to the short listed 5 per category.

  3. Jim Schwitzer has been reviewing a lot of Independent Comics over on http://talesfromtheparentsbasement.com/. He's not made them generally available as yet, but I've been allowed to listen to the first 2 of what Jim has called the Indie 500, and they're solid, well balanced views of Jim's on some of the Independent Comics that he's read recently. And 'Yes', the intention is for him to review 500 Independent Comics... a noble aim.

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