My feedback, for what it's worth.
I spotted the Crystal Brush banner on the homepage last week & perused the bare Gallery section to get a sense of how things would work. Pure fluke I encountered it though, the Forums are my default, I rarely visit the front page at all. Next year a giant heads up thread in the Forum would be appreciated.
Email in my inbox announcing online voting commenced received about 5AM Sunday morning (GMT, or possibly BST
). Read it at midday. Did a little voting. Popped out to shops, on return had missed deadline, only managed to vote on a couple of dozen entries. A big fat clock, counting down to online voting close on the right side of the page would have clued me in (and avoids time zone confusion).
Upon commencing voting I was in random mode. Was there a way to view just entries for a single category? I have no interest in squads of blummin' Space Marines but had to plough through them to get to the stuff that interests me.
I generally find the load time for these pop-up picture windows poor, a standard WIP thread on the forum & they take 10-30 seconds. I was waiting up to a minute for them to load in the Crystal Brush Gallery. I do only use a 3G dongle for internet connection though so it may just be me
The pictures, on the whole were better quality than I had anticipated but, as noted by many others, there's room for improvement next year. I did wonder if anyone had taken it into account when choosing what to enter? JRN's piece, for example, is a very simple 2-sided piece that should be easy to get a front & back shot of. Lots of bits sticking out in all directions are always going to cause focus issues, better not to enter a piece of that style?
The Winners. I want a page that I can scroll down to show me the winners like a normal webpage. Having to click on that little drop box to bring up one at a time is frustrating. So I've not even seen them all.
Pimp it more! Seems to have been fairly good exposure on the sites that I visit but barely anything last week? I guess because all of the organisers were involved in setting up for the actual con. Next year perhaps employ an office marketing monkey to sit & post all over the place, hyping the event, counting down voting deadline, etc. (I don't use Twitter or Facebook so perhaps this was done?). A bloggy/twittery update-an-hour from the con would be nice, especially for those of us who have never attended one
Lot's of camera phone quality pics of the crowds, stands, entrant queue, on the spot 3 question interviews with "name" painters, distracting stats (40% of attendees appear to be in fancy dress, 2 of 350 CB entries so far with unpainted bases, etc.)
I am disappointed not to have managed to vote on all of the entrants in the end but am not complaining about the top three, well done everyone :good:
Fingers crossed for an even stronger event next year now that a benchmark has been set.
Cheers, B.
