TWCL

[Montanto]

Hi All.

Following up on some of the points made on the "Large Archives: Bad or Good" ; I've been working on ways of improving my archive navigation. In this current beta version I've I've added the chapters' dates and broken all of the years into separate pages which can be accessed on the menubar's pull down menu, the only initial flaw being if you click the word "archive" it will take you to the blank page I used to nest all of the others and I'm still trying to figure out how to either lock the page, or find a different way to group multiple pages in the menubar.

Other than that technical problem I think it's doing the job though I'm still thinking of ways to spruce it up aesthetically. I've been tossing the around the idea of doing thumbnail images for each chapter but I worry that is (a) making too much work for me and (b) is probably overkill.

The other thing I'm wondering is how this affects the design of the page in general. Most importantly does a proper Archive page render Comicpress's calendar and archive widgets expendable? If that is the case I can think of lots of better uses for that space.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing what everybody else has been coming up with for solutions on their own pages.
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[Mithandir]

I've experimented with several ways of organising my archives. I'm not really up-to-date with my upkeep, but here's what I've currently got:

1) Archive page divided in chapters and storylines
2) Navigable AJAX archive panel on every comic showing tiny thumbnails of every comic as well as thumbs for the chapter and storyline
3) Storylines can be read with one big page per storyline (so multiple comics on a page)
4) Secondary cast pages link to storylines these characters appear in, and vice versa
5) A story-so-far summary page that gives the big lines of the story, with links to storylines.

[Dutch]

I've always just divided my archive into 'story arcs' instead of individual strips listed in an archive page. I never saw the point of having every single comic listed with an individual title. To me that just showed you didn't really expect to be doing it years from now when you had hundreds of strips to sort through, but anyway.

This is my old archive page from my previous host - http://schoolspirit.comicdish.com/?page=archive - which I was quite happy with. It shows each story arc in order with the number of strips in each, a short blurb about each one, and a small image to match. It seemed to get good feedback from the odd few who used it.

I haven't updated it into my current comic press site yet though, although I do like the way comicpress splits it into years and storylines already. I'd just like to include blurbs if I can, but haven't looked too much into it yet, to be honest.
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