People may be looking for a specific pattern match (OR A FEW) and once they skip by it, unless they have saved it in favorites - a separate step - they will have to navigate back in search of it again.
The problem with using thumbnails, of course, is keeping the tile from being downloadable. Something that would be do-able (but a fair bit of work) would be to take a screenshot of each page and miniaturize it to serve as a thumbnail. That would be a lot of thumbnails - would it be so many that it would end up not being very helpful? I can see how being able to jump to various numbers would be useful if you remembered, say, that a background you wanted to look at was towards the middle of the collection. To be honest, I hadn't even thought of the possibility that people might want to go back and look at a specific background again
since they all come as one set, but, of course, they might.
What do you think would be most useful? A table of numbered, miniature thumbnails?
When I was checking to see how the "competition" did things, I wasn't able to find any example that was really very similar. On ebay there seem to be two extremes: people who sell their tiles individually for quite a bit of money because they'd spent so many hours creating them, and others who sell 10,000 background tiles for $3.00
including reseller rights, which means you have dozens of people selling exactly the same collections and trying to undersell each other (of course, none of the people selling those actually
created any of them). I have found some sites that sell digital images in the same kind of collection I'm trying to use, so I'm looking at them as something of a guideline. But they generally show only a sampling of the images, so if someone copies them they don't get the entire set, while I'd prefer to show all of the backgrounds.
Also for me, it was a little difficult to see the words up in the header that link a person back to the "browse this set page" etc. over the dark busy patterns. But my eye sight isn't what it used to be - so that again may just be me.
I noticed after I published the autumn set that I must have forgotten to change the link colors in the top border, because the ones that are there are horrible to read against the background, so I'll definitely have to change those, and probably make the text larger, too. Since the navigation in each set is always against the
same background, I tried to pick ones that were text-friendly, but I'll look to see if there are better ones.
Thanks for the good words.
When I look around, I see some that aren't as good as mine and some that I can't even figure out how they were made
. When I see the first kind, I feel more confident; when I see the second, I'm not so sure. I guess that's why I feel better having all the backgrounds out there for people to see
before they buy them.
I'm not going to worry
too much at this point about the whole stealing issue. Like I said, if this were my livelihood I'd definitely feel differently about that. But it's basically a way to try to find some practical use - however small - for the results of my obsession, so if some people are able to get them without paying for them it's not that big of a deal.
OTOH, if I ever run across someone
selling them...