Vizdepot.com

About the Vizdepot

The idea for an online resource was originally concieved in 1996 while I was in graduate school. Having to search the internet for materials and models to make myself more productive, the idea to assemble my findings in one place was fairly logical. Seeing the explosion of the internet first hand, it was easy to see how beneficial this could be for users of the 3D Studio Viz software from Kinetix (now Autodesk Viz). Since it would be against the law to use the trademark name, I came up with the 3DDepot. Similar in concept to the Home Depot, a great building supplies resource, the site was intended to become a resource for 3D Users. Unfortunately, the concept did not manifest in a real website until December 1999 as an overly simple HTML driven site. The realization of supporting a major database was curbed by bandwidth cost and so the site became a tutorial based site.

Over the next couple of years, the site was hosted by several companies and finally became a domain in 2003. Initially, registering the site was means of becoming more serious about running a professional website, but the simply HTML based site was outdated and I had no experience with all of the new programming languages coming out in order to do something custom.

The profession of Architecture requires that we communicate through visualization, whether it be graphics, line work, renderings, or plans, we must be extremely visual and the site needed to perform in the same manner. I turned to internet and began researching forum based software’s and realized the capabilities and compatibility of vBulletin, vbPortal and Photopost. In November of 2003 I purchased my licenses and signed up with a host who did the initial setup/installation for me at vB2.3.2. I used one of the default skins and based my graphic modifications on it.

The site grew and was featured in several book commentaries and websites as a resource for visualization. Growth over the first year was steady and sought just under a million page views by December. However within that timeframe, Vbulletin, vbPortal and Photopost had all offered new major releases which began to sway me to migrate my older version to the new 3.0. I began discussing it with people on the site and posted some simple questions here at vbPortal.com. I ended up meeting and partnering with a coder who provided incredibly insightful conversations about the pros and cons of how sites were organized and how they flowed in both graphics and the user interface. Over the next month and half, we talked at length about the processes of both migrating an existing database, the potential problems and minimizing the downtime transition. A plan was formulated based upon our daily workloads and all that was left was to redefine the user interface, the graphics and the coding behind it.

Quite honestly I wasn't looking to make some significant changes because I was afraid of how existing users would feel. Change for the sake of change isn't always best in everyone's mind. More online feedback reassured me that it was possible, as long as it was better. My coder made me realize just how default or out of the box my site was. A skin was just that a skin, it was still the default functionality of a standard install. For the first year, the default functionality was fine, and I quickly realized that some of the base functionality I didn’t use or need - but that was specific to my site's needs. I also noted that there were specific needs I wanted that were addressed by the community as well so it became more and more apparent that a customized interface was necessary. Unfortunately, atleast in my case, the realization set in that a customized user interface was either site-wide or non-existent.

If I wanted to step into a more professional realm I needed to manifest all we discussed. It was determined that we would communicate via site layout images and several were created, discussed and thrown out. My coder provided guidance based upon his knowledge and experience in website layout as well as design and he really helped weed out all the bad ideas until we got to something we both really liked. From the images a standard was established to set the basis of all the other templates and while my coder did the majority of the customization, re-organization of templates and their locations, java, etc...I was busy formatting graphics and quite honestly learning how to code to W3C web standards. Each template was reviewed, and designed with the overall picture in mind to make the site as cohesive as possible. I did attempt to specialize a couple of templates to make them more unique, this is specific to the member templates, the articles as well as the entire front end of vbPortal.

vbPortal from a code standpoint lends itself to customization. The template based format, like both vBulletin and Photopost, is quite easily manipulated. Alot of the code modifications were simple due to the quality of the how the code was organized, debugged and commented. Like I mentioned before, some of the functionality was not readily used so it was simply turned off, but for the most part vbPortal has proven to be an excellent front end for my site due to its stability and security.

Throughout the planning, design, graphics and coding, the process took almost 5 months, but please bear in mind, this site is solely allocated to my personal time. It is not a full time job. It follows that the time spent was relative to the time available to do it. To all those who assisted my questions on the vbPortal forums, I wanted to offer my thanks.

On behalf of me and my coder, we appreciate the site's recognition on vbPortal.