Hello, everyone!

I had the chance to sit down with our devs and talk about where we go from here for commission development – we have a functional system, but there are a few key things missing:

• It’s hard to see who is open for commissions. Yes, you can look at a user’s page or at the community commission page, but that’s it.
• It’s not attention grabbing. When I look at the community commission page, I don’t see any reason to pick one artist unless I know them.
• There’s no quick information about the kinds of commissions being offered by the seller. I have to navigate to each user’s individual page to see what they have to offer. If I’m looking for a writer, this is incredibly frustrating.

During our discussion, we realized it was going to be a hefty project to complete, but this is also the most important – we want anyone to be able to be successful when selling commissions, and we want lesser-known users to be seen.

Here’s a list of the features that we’re planning on implementing in order to address those issues. We expect things to be together in January or February with possible updates in the interim.

Community Commissions Page

We’ve talked about this some before, but it’s much easier to catch a buyer’s eye visually – if someone sees something they like, they’re likely to click and check out prices. Because of this, browsing will be based around imagery instead of user icons.

This is a prototype, of course, but we want users to be able to see the various commission types without navigating to the seller’s page. Price sheets will still be important, of course, but the price at the top left will help give a solid baseline for shoppers.

We have a few features rolling into this, as well:

• Users can select a number of media types (full color, sketch, etc.) to advertise. They’ll be categories created by administration, and we will update them as requested. This will also allow users to search by that specific media type.
• Images shown will be cropped from images in the user’s gallery. The user will choose the images to crop – we want your ad space to shine.
• Review ratings will be available with more information when hovered over. We want to give you quick information without requiring additional clicks and loading pages.
• Users can search based on media type, price, number of characters, and seller specialties (we’ll get to that in a bit).

Seller Lists

Simply put, sellers will need to have some additional options – we want people seeing your ad to be interested in what you’re selling:

• We will include a list of specialties. Sellers will be able to list a number of specialties, and when a user searches for that term, the seller will appear higher on the list. If you are a fantastic paw drawer, you may use that as a specialty to get more commissions featuring what you love!
• We’ll also have a seller blacklist – if you don’t want to create something, adding it to the blacklist will remove you from search results for that term.

Info on Users’ Commission Pages and Messages

There’s not too much information right now on users’ commission pages; there’s room for a price sheet and additional info, but since we have galleries, there’s much more that can be done.

• Users will have portfolios for each media type they’re selling. They’ll be able to add whatever submissions they want to those portfolios; that way, potential buyers can quickly see examples.
• Messages sent through the commission system will have fields to fill out for essential information. Users may also select images from their gallery to include as reference sheets.

Reviews

We’ve discussed this multiple times before, but we’ll be adding a review system for both buyers and sellers as well as dispute systems. We’ll have more information in the future with all the details.

Badges for Sellers

If someone sees your submission and you’re open for commissions, we want to make sure they know that. We’re planning badges on icons and next to user names to show who is open.

Cross Advertising for Sellers

We’ve been working with other fandom sites, and we’re planning to allow sellers to show their advertisements from FN to those sites. This would allow you to have free advertising on other sites that have your work. The advertising option could be disabled, of course, but we’d want to help make you as visible as possible. We’ll have more details as time goes on.

We also have a backlog of other changes and improvements that will be made, but we’re starting to see the final shape of the website; it’s been a long journey, but early next year, we may just be able to take that “beta” off the URL.

Thank you again for all your excitement and support!

Digby