Today the CISV shirts archive is exactly four years old. With more than 400 shirts online, there's enough reason to be proud. However, only a few shirts have been added this last year, and although the number of daily visitors (10-15) is quite constant, I wonder if there are ways to make the website more interesting. I've been thinking of making the website more into a database, than a blog, where you can search by country, by year or even by color. On the other hand that would require a lot of work, and I'm not sure too many people are interesting in "datamining" the CISV shirt archives...in the end, I guess, the best way would be to have new shirts uploaded. So anybody reading this - got some CISV shirts and a digital camera (odds are, that you do have both!), please mail them in or upload them directly...directions to be found here. Any other ideas to improve the website? Please leave your comments.
In order to prevent the same shirt from being posted more than once, a database is fundamental. The site will also be more organized.
So what about creating a database, but the front page will have the latest uploaded pictures? It should be done in a way that everyone could help completing/correcting information about the t-shirts, kind of wiki-style.
I could help.
Thanks Martin for offering help.
A "wiki-style" database for the CISV shirts is exactly what I was thinking off. However, the more complicated the system gets, the more effort it will be to maintain it. The solution right now, combining a blog with flickr is relatively low on maintenance, and best off all, I could easily hand over most administration rights to somebody else.
Apart from that, these days it's not like there's a ton of new shirts every week - so I guess for now the T-shirt archive will stay as it is. Maybe for the 5th anniversary it's time for a major overhaul.
I'll get back to you on that!