Just last month, we announced the promotion of Jenifer
Carey to VP of the Renderosity division. Jenifer has
taken over the day-to-day  operations of Renderosity for Tim Choate, President
of Bondware, to free him up to focus on other key development
areas. "I am confident in Jenifer's abilities to handle every
aspect of the Renderosity Art Community," said Choate. "I
have worked with her for 11 years and trust that she will do an
excellent job. She cares about the community and has watched
Renderosity grow from day one. She has what it takes to steer
Renderosity in the right direction."As our new VP, she gets the honors of the annual Community Spotlight. Jenifer has served the Renderosity Art Community for many years in many different areas as the VP of Finance, Renderosity Copyright Agent, Marketplace Admin, Product Tester and Forum Admin. She has been with the community from the beginning and knows all the ins and outs of daily operations and management. Background: Hi, I'm Jenifer Carey, I was born in Virginia, raised in Florida and found my home in Nashville, Tennessee. I started working in the Internet industry in 1995 when hired as an Administrative Assistant for a local ISP that Tim Choate founded. In that company I developed the joy of learning, especially in the areas related to Internet Services. I have experience as an Accounting Specialists, Technical Support Manager, and Customer Service Manager. I have played an active part in Renderosity since September of 2000. 2006 has been a
major year of change for Renderosity, what are some of
the highlights?
 There are so many things Renderosity accomplished in the last year.   We started the year with a huge site conversion task to overcome. We had set an expectation of a year.  I am happy (and thankful) to say the conversion is complete. We had spent seven years customizing the old “ease†(.ez) software into what it was, so we will likely be spending a bit of time customizing the new PHP site to meet the needs of the community. There were well over 100,000 lines of code that were written in order to meet our goal of porting Renderosity from EASE to PHP in the past 12 months. Here is a good break-down of PHP conversion so you can get an idea of how busy we have been.  In January we converted the Marketplace In February -- Chat March --  Front page articles March/April -- Forums & Polls May  it was SiteMail June was a big month with the Galleries  conversion. It launch with new  features like the Art Charts and Gallery Patrol . July was the File Lockers, New Blogs & member profiles and  member records August was the FreeStuff & Graffiti Wall September the Tutorials, Contests & Surveys were converted October the Member search, SnapShots, and Animation Outlet  were complete. And this month was the LinkShare (old webring) launch.  Membership grew 17% and we have continued to see growth in all areas of the site.  We had another exciting year attending Siggraph.  We purchased six new servers, a large file storage server, and upgraded our database server.  We added more art schools, universities and software partners to our community network.  We had a banner year of Contest Sponsors that donated awesome prizes.  ÂÂ
Which accomplishment do you personally think
was the biggest success this year?Â
Please see the answer to question 1 :  )  LOL!!!  It was definitely the conversion; I mean
we felt, breathed, slept, ate, sweated, cried, laughed and
bleed PHP conversion.
It means continued, positive growth. Our staff have been
mentored by the best (the Choates), and our awesome team makes it a
joy to come to work everyday. I think if we stay focused and strive
to continually improve, just as we always have, then the community
will reap the benefits. I wish the community knew our
staff a little better, because I think they are all truly
wonderful people. Who knows? Maybe we can do some "meet
the staff" type articles.
What new things can the community expect for 2007? Â
"The same thing we do every year, Pinky. Try to take
over the world."  HAHAHA!! Sorry, I have been
watching too many re-runs of the Animaniacs cartoon Pinky and the
Brain.
Â
Okay, seriously now. Our team has many grand ideas that
we want to accomplish in 2007.Â
Â
Our number one goal is to improve site speed (that's where the
same as every year comes in). Improving site speed is a
moving target. The more we increase performance the more traffic,
and search engine crawlers we get that end up slowing the site
down. However, we will continue to fight to
balance the Dark Forces of the over-zealous engine crawlers
that can often been seen as site destroyers.
We also have plans to help community members interact more with individuals with like interest. Our surveys indicated the desire for better searches, Marketplace improvements, better site navigation, FAQ, and better homepages. When summarized like this, it does not seem like much. We are planning to work on all these areas, and I am expecting 2007 to be our best year ever! Â
Reminder: Our bi-annual community graphics
contest is coming in 2007 too. I look forward to seeing lots
of participation and creative entries.
If you have any questions that you would like to ask, please post them below in the "Opinions" form. Published November 13, 2006
|
| kjpweb posted: Well - speed is a concern of course - but it has gotten better. I'm not too happy with the overall appearance. One thing that bugs me much is that the navigation has moved to the right. That's trend - but ergonomical nonsense. Statistically proven. The color scheme is bland. gray and a very muted bluish tone cries tristess. It would be a huge optical improvement, separating content from background, by using a simple white background (as do major major players on the net - for good reason). The design itself is one that even in the late 90's would not have found much attention. It is bland and outdated. The blogs are optically outright ridiculous, compared what current standards in design is concerned. And there is lagging behind in terms of user friendliness and customization. Example? Here you go. I don't know, how many images are being upload in all categories, but I know, that I hardly can keep up with my favorite category. But I have to go and select my preferences every day. Ajax and other technologies make it easy for programmers to provides choices to the user (Especially in PHP/SQL configs). Why can I as a user not select and store my preferences, on what galleries I prefer to see? It really is a drag on every level to dig through feetlong dropdown lists. I upload in one, maybe two main galleries (as an average user, and in maybe five or six subcats. Instead of having individual defaults I have to scroll. That is not user friendly. I truly wish that you put some efforts in making the site more attractive on the optical level and check into the areas where user friendliness can be improved. |
| Reply to kjpweb: kjweb, Our number one goal is to continually improve our site; whether it be speed, function, features, or navigation. As mentioned before, site performance is an on-going battle that we will continue to fight. Our bi-annual community graphics contest is coming in 2007. This will provide a fresh new graphic look to the site. During this time we will take a look at ways to add more features and to freshen up the overall layout to make navigation of the site more user friendly. Thank you for your suggestions and feedback. |
| Gongyla posted: For me, the conversion has not brought what I was hoping for: Renderosity is still at times extremely slow, and this independant of the number of artists online. Seen the fact that other large sites don't have this problem, I can only hope it will get better in the future. I also asked for a browse option at the bottom of the first page of the galleries, the What's new page that opens when one clicks Galleries in the navigation. Easy to add, and it would make browsing much more user-friendly. I got no reply, so I bring this to your attention. Apart from that, I wish you lots of fun and success with your job. |
| Reply to Gongyla: Thanks! It's a lot of fun working at Renderosity. We have made some improvements with site performance since we added six new servers, a large file storage server, and upgraded our database server, and I would guess the slowness you sometimes encounter has to do with the crawlers (search bots) that go wild. We will continue to improve site speed and make Renderosity an enjoyable experience. Thanks for your suggestion on the gallery browsing. We will keep them it mind when we work on updating the site navigation and when adding new features. |
| easyjobrob asked: Why is is not possible for non members to browse the art pages? Surely letting non memebers see the excellent work that is being produced and the supportive and creative comments posted by members will encourage them to also become ROers? Great site BTW :)_ |
| Answer to easyjobrob: Thanks! I'm glad to hear you like Renderosity. I'm rather partial to the site myself : ) Viewing the awesome images in our galleries is a benefit of joining the site, and it is a free membership to join Renderosity. Making the galleries open to visitor browsing is a problem that goes back to site performance because of the search engine crawlers. We started opening up the forums to visitors and noticed the crawlers (and slowness from them) right away. So, it's a work in progress. |
| AnteriorLobe asked: Following from the last answer, I'm just curious if the new policy of requiring a membership to view gallerys will prevent search engines from scanning the site. This seems to be what you're saying, on the other hand the HTML for the gallery pages have the robot and googlebot metatags set to allow search engines to scan the gallerys. My guess is that search engines are being stopped (at least pesky ones that hit too often), and the meta-tags are holdovers. Is this right? Thanks! |
| Answer to AnteriorLobe : No, the log in required to browse the galleries will not stop the crawlers from doing their job on the rest of the site. At this point, we are still doing quite a bit of tweaking, so we may have improvements around the search engine optimization where we might could one day open the galleries up to visitors again. We have to get more comfortable with site performance first, and then we can re-evaluate the pros and cons of it. Yes, the meg-tags are just legency data. |
| thefixer said: No questions right now, just wanted to congratulate you on your new post, hope it goes well for you! |
| Reply to thefixer: Thanks!! Feel free to contact us at admin@renderosity.com if you do come up with any questions later on. |
| bovi asked: Since Renderosity switched to promoting New Exclusive products, What's Hot products, and Products in their last few days of sales I noticed my sales dropping. Has this move benefitted Renderosity's bottomline? Also, are there any plans on promoting older Exclusive and Non-Exclusive products? And since I'm on older Exclusive products, are there any plans on offering more incentives to Non-Top 35 Vendors? One more question. :-D How will Renderosity respond to Content Paradise's tactics in acquiring more Vendor/Providers? |
| Answer to bovi: I have been involved in Renderosity and the Marketplace for over six years, so speaking from historical data I can say that sales just naturally tend to decline on older items in the Marketplace. There are also other market variables at play that can affect an items ability to sell. I viewed your store and it appears that your sales are likely a little slow because you haven't released any new items since July. Renderosity has always promoted Exclusives, What's Hot and the items that are currently on sale. That's not about the bottom line so much as it's about giving the buyers the sort options they requested (the bottom line does by nature become a benefactor of happy customers, though). We have several plans in the hopper to help all Vendors. I hope you will visit the Vendor forums to see all the great things Clint & Debbie are working on. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which company is actively recruiting Vendors, we will continue to focus on making Renderosity's Marketplace the preferred place for artist to sell their creative works. We welcome everyone's suggestions on how we can improve our Marketplace. Please send an email to store@renderosity.com and our Store Staff will seriously consider the suggestions. |
| MarkHirst asked: I would echo the comment about navigation on the right, also the colour scheme and density of links in the navigation is too high. On the problem of visitors, could you have a anonymous visitor check, perhaps asking people to enter a random code displayed on a crazy pattern before letting them in ? |
| Answer to MarkHirst: One of our goals this year is to improve site layout and navigation. I'm not sure if the sidebar placement will change since we have data that a large percentage of the community member's preferred the sidebar on the right. Yeah, we will consider the verification of a "real" visitor if we open up the galleries to visitors again. |
| fastburn said: Even though changes are a good thing, some changes are not. I for one miss the fact that when i would log on to Rosity, i would see a notice telling me i had x number of messages. Having to go to the site mail and checking the in box is just extra time i dont want to waste. I would really love it if Rosity borught that back! Thanks! |
| Reply to fastburn: You still get a notice when someone SiteMails you. It just looks different. There is text on the right hand side of the header right under the "login/logout" link that says "You Have 2 New Messages" (or however many # of messages you have). |
| tistur_d said: I agree with kjpweb on all points, and would add the absence of a Help or FAQS feature is a disgrace. I had a simple question about the icons used in the marketplace, and have spent ten minutes looking for the answer. I encountered broken and wrongly-labeled links, as well not finding the answer. |
| Reply to tistur_d: Our FAQs are on schedule to be launched very soon. In the mean time, if you have any questions please feel free to email admin@renderosity.com and we will be glad to answer your questions. |
| ashokscape posted There are a lot of features in Renderosity that make it a great place to be. I love the details when the mouse hovers above each picture, the stats which are very encouraging, the art charts and almost everything here. I first entered like a greedy pig to feed on freebies, and only now have evolved to putting my gallery up. In the immediate future I plan to put up freebies for my wonderful friends here, and then graduate to a vendor in two months. Suggestion: Many of my friends here are ladies, and is it possible for you to word differently the email that we get when my fave artist uploads her image? Now veverybody puts up 'his' image. Maybe there's someway you can make it neutral? As it could be difficult to change his to her depending on the gender. Anyway, I love it here, and enjoy the feeling of goodwill all around... |
| Reply to ashokscape I am very glad to hear that you love Renderosity. I will check on the email wording when one of your favorite artists puts up a new image. Thanks for your suggestion. |
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