Mongrel website - whoop whoop

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Mongrel
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Re: Mongrel website (poll removed - new question)

Postby Mongrel » Tue Apr 07, 2015 2:03 am

There's a wide variety of thread formats for this sort of thing, but the good ones will have lots of pics, certainly.
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sei
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Re: Mongrel website (poll removed - new question)

Postby sei » Tue Apr 07, 2015 4:50 am

Go look at game OTs on NeoGAF for inspiration.
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Mongrel
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Re: Mongrel website (poll removed - new question)

Postby Mongrel » Tue Apr 07, 2015 10:05 am

I'm already pretty well-versed with how this stuff is generally presented on minis sites, so I should be good there.
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Re: Mongrel website (new frontpage?)

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 18, 2015 4:24 pm

What do we think of this as a different frontpage?

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I'm not sold on it yet. It seems like a better design on a fundamental level, but it's coming off a bit flat. Wondering if I should add an effect to the circles, like some slight small shading to add a pseudo-lensing effect without image distortion. Or if there's a better way to do the buttons?

EDIT: Slight tweak of image positions

Also, I might reduce the contrast on the background texture.
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Re: Mongrel website (new frontpage?)

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 18, 2015 5:25 pm

Actually here's a revised version which ought to be much improved

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Here are some further alternate takes on the background texture (you can see I'm reducing the contrast a lot, so it doesn't clash so much with the foreground).

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EDIT: I changed it again.
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Re: Mongrel website (new frontpage?)

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 18, 2015 6:47 pm

Here's another version with a drastic cut in the number of images.

Pros: Less busy and cluttered

Cons: The shooting star shape is less well-defined, less of my range is showcased on the splash page.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: I Added a poll. Here's the two images for reference:

v1

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v2

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Re: Mongrel website (new frontpage?)

Postby Büge » Mon May 18, 2015 9:43 pm

Well, I prefer the second one, but your poll lists it as the first one.
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Re: Mongrel website (new frontpage?)

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 18, 2015 10:11 pm

Whoops. Fixed the post, left the poll the same.
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Re: Mongrel website (terms & conditions stuff)

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jun 04, 2015 12:23 am

Okay, I'm lucky enough that I know a few professional minis painters, one of whom was happy to help and is perfectly okay with me cribbing from his own excellent terms & conditions page. Since I am not as good as he is, have a few other things going on, and am offering additional services, I rewrote it and added quite a lot more to cover other types of art. Anybody want to have a look at this?

T & C (.DOCX file)

I'm not trying to lay out something legally watertight, just laying out some fairly firm expectations and ground rules.

EDIT: I just caught that the "minimum order" line for terrain is wrong. I've fixed that on my own copy.
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Re: Mongrel website (terms & conditions stuff)

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jul 04, 2015 8:51 pm

My brother couldn't do this for a while because he had to buy a whole new computer. Now that he has it, we're back on track, albeit six weeks later.

Anyway, he's asked me to provide some keywords and such for very very basic SEO. A list of keywords is easy enough to brainstorm, but I was just wondering if anyone had any basic tips for things/terms to avoid or to make sure to use? Obviously googling for tips on SEO is like opening a door to the pits of hell.
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 28, 2015 1:08 pm

The site is halfway operational now, with the image gallery being the main thing that's missing. I know getting it running has been as slow as anything, but my brother doesn't get much time to work on this thing so it's always been catch as catch can.

Anyway, for a couple of reasons I've decided that I want to ditch the current name (based on a username I tend to use on gaming sites) and instead I do want to play off my 'Mongrel' name for the website after all - 1) 'Mongrel' has always been a good descriptor for me, 2) I want to use mongrel references in my marketing bits, and 3) The URL will still make some kind of sense after redirecting to my brontospace, since the hosting url has 'mongrel' in it.

mongrelstudios.com has already been taken and is some kind of low-rent film studio, but that's okay because I decided a purely descriptive url is too boring and that it would be cute to have a url which either rhymes or is alliterative. This constrains me quite a bit ('mongrel' doesn't generate a lot of hits for either of those), but after combing scrabble databases and thesauruses for a while, I had some interesting options come up:

mongreldoggerel
mongrelminstrel
mongrelsdrivel
mongrelhovel
equilateralmongrel
fancifulmongrel
originalmongrel
fantasticalmongrel
artisticalmongrel

Of those, I like fancifulmongrel the best. It has good implied meanings that relate to what I'm doing without boxing me in, and flows more naturally as a phrase when spoken out loud. The first three would work better if I was a writer or musician, so they're probably the worst. fantastical and artistical are okay, but fanciful seems to do what they do, but is much nicer.

What do you guys think? Any alternative ideas?
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby François » Tue Jul 28, 2015 10:47 pm

I immediately hated fancifulmongrel, but I thought about it for ten seconds and now I dig it for real. I'm not sure how that works.

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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 28, 2015 11:41 pm

:/

I'm not sure if that's a good reaction or not.
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 29, 2015 12:34 am

Things that might be worth thinking about:

Is it easy to spell?

Is it easy to pronounce?

If you say it out loud, will people remember it and know how to spell it?

If you type the words in the name (or close misspellings) into Google, are there any sites that are likely to come up higher than yours in the search rankings?

I think most of your suggestions fail on one or more of those criteria (doggerel, drivel, hovel, and equilateral are all uncommon words which people might not recognize or know how to spell; original is an extremely common word and likely to fuck up searches).

Mongrel Miniatures (or Mongrel's Miniatures) would be boringly on-the-nose but also would also tell people exactly what your site is about, and it's memorable because it alliterates. (And while "miniature" is a hard word to spell, your audience is likely to know how to spell it.)

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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 29, 2015 12:51 am

The problem with miniatures is twofold

1) I'm trying not to pigeonhole myself early as miniatures-only. If I can sell illustrations too, this will be good/important.
2) There used to be an actual Mongrel Miniatures. It's recently-defunct, but that doesn't mean there might not be IP/confusion issues (and also the url is owned by a squatter).
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby LaserBeing » Wed Jul 29, 2015 12:57 am

if you're going to be doing a whole bunch of WWII-era pulp noir adventure tabletop miniatures and related paraphernalia I don't know why you wouldn't just go with "Iron Mongrel"

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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 29, 2015 1:20 am

Mongrel wrote:The problem with miniatures is twofold

1) I'm trying not to pigeonhole myself early as miniatures-only. If I can sell illustrations too, this will be good/important.
2) There used to be an actual Mongrel Miniatures. It's recently-defunct, but that doesn't mean there might not be IP/confusion issues.


I'd worry a lot more about #2 than #1; a site that does what it says on the tin can do more things than it says on the tin. But if there was already another organization operating under that name, yeah, you should probably avoid that.

Iron Mongrel isn't bad; currently a search for that comes up with a bunch of results for Iron Monger, but if you had a site that was actually called Iron Mongrel that would hopefully rank higher than the close-but-not-quite matches.

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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 29, 2015 2:02 am

Hm, that's one idea, certainly.

I guess I don't think of it, because I came to dislike the name (there was a while it was confused as being some kind of Iron Monkey reference and I decided that an unqualified 'Mongrel' made for a cleaner nick anyway), but it is sort of a cute pun and and ironmonger sort of fits miniatures work.

Unfortunately, like mongrelminiatures, the name is held by a domain squatter.
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 29, 2015 2:17 am

I have been made aware that there are still English-speaking countries where mongrel is a pretty clear insult. Not that that would put me off - beyond my general embracing and approval of mongrels, art-related businesses have an easier time getting away with names that would otherwise be quite negative - but it's worth thinking about whether I want my site to be named something like "fantastical scumbag" in some countries.

(I suppose there already was a Mongrel Miniatures... but as I mentioned they went out of business, so maybe that's not the best example, haha)
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Re: Mongrel website (renaming)

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 29, 2015 9:28 pm

Since I can't decide what alternative would be the "best of the rest", I just decided to keep the original boring URL and name in the interest of "gettin' shit done".
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