I think it will be an interesting thing to discuss. Many Simpsons sites I'm visiting use the same ideas again and again - not because they are bad or good, but imho because site authors usually don't want to stop and to think of something new, something unique, something that makes your site interesting and unknown. I'm not a skilled webmaster (although I have some experience in webdesign/webcoding), but I must say that in the most of the cases, when I see a link to a new Simpsons-dedicated site recently, I know what I will see there even before I click on it, and that's sad. So let's fantasize about it a bit; tell others how the Simpsons site of your dream should look like and function.

Here's some thoughts from me. Hopefully, they won't be too shocking.

1. The design and layout should be original. I prefer to see an ugly, inconvenient navigation on the site than to see that overused "Header-LeftPanel-Content-RightPanel-Footer" scheme. My old site had that scheme, and I almost hate myself now for being unable to produce something less common This is an entertaining site, it was made for fun, not for profits - so try to make it look interesting!

2. There should be no newsline on the main page. When the first thing you see is a dozen of news (especially if they are short, i.e. "Added some grabs", "New season started today"), this makes you feel that that's some kind of a business site, not entertaining one. It leaves an impression that the site lives its own life, without you, and that you aren't needed there. This negative effect can be softened though; addressing directly to visitors, placing smilies or emoticons, using news titles that can make you smile - anything that shows that the site author thinks more about you than about the update itself, would work well.

3. If you have an image gallery, make sure each picture has at least its own title. Having also a short description explaining the drawing is a perfect option; this is not an easiest thing to do, but it makes your galleries much more interesting. This applies to original art of course; I don't know how to put grabpics on a site as nicely. For some funny reason, I've seen such amount of grabpiccing only on Simpsons sites, nowhere else. All other shows/canons tend to produce original art. I have only one suggestion about grabs: if you have big grabpic galleries on your site, it would be nice to allow the visitor to download them altogether, in a ZIP archive or something. It's hard to estimate a grabpic from a small thumbnail, and it's cruel to make the visitor click on the "Next" button, say, 200 times.

Again, this is just my personal opinion. Feel free to argue about it if you think I'm wrong.

That's an interesting topic indeed, and I agree with many of your thoughts as well. When I made KMS back in 2001, I tried to be somewhat original as well, although LMS surely was an inspiration for me (and one of my main motivations back then was to create a German version of LMS).

One thing I hate most is the standard "header - left panel with navigation - right panel with content, starting with the news - footer" design. This looks so "out of the box", and nearly every CMS is designed the same way. Ok, one advantage is that you'll easily find all items at some standard places, just like in a newspaper, but it is - let's face it - plain boring. Now while a horizontal navigation isn't that new either, I think that I made quite a good use of ancient technologies like frames and rollovers when creating the navigation on KMS.

And although I haven't worked much on the site, I still think it's a fresh look, while nearly all other sites use the standard approach described above. Of course, I have other ideas as well, and they might look even better, but unfortunately, I don't have that much time anymore, so those ideas collect dust on my "to-do" list for the time being... As for the news, I also decided to show only the most current update, and I always tried to make it a "story" rather than just listing the changes.

Your ideas about the picture galleries are also valid, and it's quite funny when I look back. To my surprise, nearly all Simpsons sites used simple link lists for their picture galleries, I think KMS was one of the first Simpsons sites that used thumbnails at all! I also think I was the first one who used pop-up windows to display them, so people didn't have to go back and forth all the time when clicking on a thumbnail. Interesting enough, Alicia introduced a thumbnail gallery as well, shortly after I implemented mine, and other sites followed our example.

Now this is understandable, since DSL and cable modems just became popular in 2000/2001, and for dial-up users, those text links were faster indeed. With today's popularity of broadband connections, other methods may be better, but we'll have to remember that broadband isn't available everywhere. The idea of separate ZIP files sounds nice, however that would mean you have to update that ZIP file again and again, whenever you upload a new pic. It's probably only useful as an archive, i. e. for every 50 pics that got uploaded, and certainly, it's only feasible for larger galleries.

As for the popularity of making grab-pics from the show, I guess that's some "by-product" of the promocards that were introduced many years ago. Fanart aside, I think we all agree that framegrabs are usual of very low quality, so they're basically a waste of time and bandwidth, other than using them as reference material for particular scenes. I assume that people wanted to have high-quality Simpsons pics just like the promocards, and so they started to trace framegrabs. The Simpsons is a very popular show, and any other cartoon probably didn't have the audience to produce such an amount of fansites, thus it was simply not possible to show original fanart on every Simpsons site, since there weren't that many artists. But with custom-made grab-pics and wallpapers, every Simpsons site was able to provide original content.

As someone who does this regularly maybe I should say something.

These days something new, unique is pretty hard to come up with, particually in information and multimedia sections. Pretty much everything has been done. With Technology advancing, and more use on the internet, a few new ideas have cropped up, specifically, with the Playstation Portable, where you can personalise it with a wallpaper and if you have a case you can do that too. Parodies are pretty common these days, but technically they're still original. The easiest original section to come up with is quite obvious, Fan Fiction and Fan Art. Thats the section where you can run loose.

Content wise, most probably. But with a design sometimes you dont even know what to expect, when I redesign The Cutest Baby, I work on it in secret, now, I'll be using my local webserver for its testing. There are still a few sites out there that can still suprise you.

Really thats all a matter of opinion, the owner of the site, might consider their site the site of their dreams on how it looks and operates.

Wait until Key to Springfield comes along, Nick will sure supirise you. But Nick and I did have a pain in the ass coming up with it. These days, everything has been done. So coming up with an original design is kind of hard to do. Splash pages are worthless, and double navigations are the most common because they are the easiest to pull off.

I strongly disagree there. A Simpsons site must have regular updates to the site which get announced on the first page you come to. Otherwise in most cases, it will be considered "dead" or "frozen in time". As you know, I use Multi Talk 2 to perform the updates using SSI.php, and I've limited it to 5. The only thing there I do agree with is make in-jokes and quote the show, I make alot of stabs towards Nick Wright, the owner of KTS, and make jokes about our AIM convos.

Until I read whats coming later, but I would NEVER give alt texts to more than 40,000 images, which is about the number I have including the Framegrabs.

Futurama, Family Guy, American Dad and South Park all have Grabpiccers, but they call them different terms. Futurama I know calls them "Scan Art" which is incorrect really.


And let them steal your entire gallery at one click? I dont think so.

There are jerks out there that steal my content, I wont name names, but I caught them and sent them packing. I know that regular fans arent really gonna do nothing but look at the pictures, but those n00bs who create websites will try to take my art and pass it off as their own. And I dont tollerate that.

What about adding a signature to your pics? Of course not something that just sits on white background, but a little "scribble" in the same range as in the pic (that is, not totally out of the lines, maybe overlapping just a tiny part) . MOst people are too lazy to remove them and you already get rid of 90% of the pic-stealers

In another topic: I think if you want regular updates, you have to have multiple webmasters, and stay up to date with each other. Just in case sombody is ill, or unforseen consiquences means they cannot update for a while.
Doesnt have to be daily updates, or even weekly. As long as they're on time