FAQ : New Site Guide | abbywinters.com

New site? What was the old site?Top

Our website design, and "back end" has been through several iterations. In 2000 and 2001, it was lovingly hand-coded in HTML (slow, inefficient, ugly). Then, from 2002 to 2005, we switched to a databased back end. Wanting more features and a new look, we redesigned it again, and from 2005 to Feb 2010, we had a site that was awesome in 2005, slightly less awesome in 2006 and so on. In 2009, it looked a little... dated. We wanted to add more new features, for things we never even thought were possible back in 2004 when we wrote it.

Note that we're not talking about the content here, we're talking about the "back end", the code and databases that make the site possible, and make it easy for us to add and organise shoots, and for members to interact with it, and of course the "look and feel".

So this time, we did it right. We put a lot of time into planning out what we really wanted from our site, and reviewed all the feature requests and ideas we had received from members over the last five years. We also looked at the broader adult industry, and the internet as a whole. What are the trends? What can we do to reduce the time it takes for a member to find what they want? How can we take advantage of lots of members annotating our content, to make it more useful to other members? What things can we do to make sure we never box ourselves in if a new technology arrives and we want to use it on our site? How can we make the site fun to use? What approaches were other companies using to solve these problems, and how can we ensure we can work with them if we wanted? What will scale well? What open standards are available?

From the start of 2009, we started coding and designing, and in Feb 2010, we finally released our baby. It has a lot of new features compared to our old site, but what's more exciting for us is that over the next year (and more), we can add cool things to our site easily and quickly. We'll discuss these new site ideas with members in the abbywinters.com labs forum, and you're welcome to join in.

What you're looking at now is our new site. It's very exciting for us, but we understand that as a member or visitor, you really just want to see our shoots easily, and it's certainly designed with that as the key. If you notice a bug, please let us know. If you have ideas for a feature, we'd love to hear from you.

How do I find a model whose name I know?Top

If you know the name of a model, simply type it in the search bar - or type just the first few letters, and after a second, a list of suggestions shows up in the drop down. Click the model name you want, and click the search icon, a magnifying glass. The results will show all the shoots that model has appeared in, and her Model Profile Page.

The Model Profile Page is a great jumping off point. If you like a model, you can see all her shoots listed here, and other things that apply to this model (for members of our old site, we did not have this page before).

How do I find pics and vids that match a keyword (like, "big boobs")?Top

TIP: Watch our intro video to see an overview on how this works.

If you know you like a certain type of thing (for example, green eyes, or hairy models, or small breasts or shoots done outside, etc), you can choose to see a list of things (or "entities" - models, shoots, images, videos) that match. You can add several filters together, to really drill down to a shortlist (you can also drill down too far, or select opposing filters, like "inside" and "outside" will result in 0 matches!).

You can search for a tag, using the search box, or on the browse page, by filtering.

So, down the left side of the page, click on a tag you like the sound of. The page reloads to show only things (models, shoots) that match that tag. You'll see the active filters area (at the top left of the page) shows a check mark, indicating that that filter is active. If you make a mistake, mouse over the tag, it changes to an X mark - and click to remove that tag from filtering your results. You can add as many tags as you want, one by one, drilling down until you find results you like the look of. You can save this filter/search by adding a bookmark. As we add new material to the site, the results will be automatically updated when you hit that bookmark.

For example, add "models", "age 18-20", "hairy", "explicit posing", "brown hair", "blue eyes" to see the list of models who have blue eyes, brown hair, do shoots with explicit posing, have lots of pubic hair, and are aged between 18 and 20 years old at the time of a shoot.

Note that by default, both models *and* shoots are listed, so it can look like the same model is listed twice. That might be a good thing - it depends on the tags you are searching for - but you can easily show *only shoots*, or *only models*, by selecting that special tag from the TYPE section of tags, near the top on the left of the page.

You can also use the AGE and HEIGHT sliders, to add filters of age and height. First, drag the pips to the upper and lower limits you'd like, then click the + to add that as a filter.

How do I tag something?Top

Because we have a huge collection of models, shoots, images and videos, it can be hard to find what you want (sometimes, we find it hard to find what we want, and we created all these shoots!). To help you (and us), we have a tagging system.

"Tags", are metadata (data about data) created by us, and members and models who use the site, to create a Folksonomy, a classification system developed by the people who use the system (as opposed to a taxonomy, a classification system defined by scientists that others have to follow). Anyone who uses our site can apply any tag, to any thing (models, shoots, images, videos), and the more people tag stuff, the better the site becomes for all users.

It can get a little anarchic, and sometimes, some people do dumb things with tags (don’t be one of those people - they always get bad gifts at Christmas), but most people do good things. And even average things help the system get better.

It's good because it's easy to tag stuff, and the tagging of stuff helps other people (for example, Google is a useful tool, because people tag their own web pages, though that's a little different from what we're doing here). Tags really come to the fore when you are searching ("only show me shoots where the model has big boobs") and filtering ("of those big-boobed models, only show me the ones shot on a beach").

To tag something, you have to be on a page that allows stuff to be tagged - that would be a Model's Profile page, a shoot page, a video page, or an image page. Towards the bottom of the page, you'll see the tagging bar, that looks like this for Rachel S (this is from her Solo Shoot page):

Some of the tags refer to her body and styling. Others refer to how or where shoots she appears in occur (really, those tags should be attached to a SHOOT, not a model, but it's not a big deal). Some tags are subjective opinions of the model. Tags applied by us are more important - because we produced the shoot and we know our website well, you can trust that if we tag a model with braces, she really does have braces (whereas, one of those dumb people, they might tag a model they wished had braces with "braces").

If a tag is already listed and you agree with it, you can vote it up. The more votes a tag has, the higher up on the list it appears, and the more credibility it has. If 100 people vote that Rachel has braces, it's quite likely she has them, and that lots of people think this is important, which means it's more likely to be relevant to people who are seeing Rachel for the first time. Note that you can only vote for a tag for an entity (model, shoot, image, video), once. Votes by trusted people (for example, AW staff, or trusted members) may be worth more, 2, 10, 100, 10,000 - it depends.

You can vote for a tag in two ways:

1. Type it in the "add a tag" popup

   

2. Mouse over it in the existing tag list, and click on the green "thumps up" icon.

   

Tags have colours, indicating who added them:

Green: You voted this tag up, or, you added this tag
Grey: You voted this tag down
Blue: Someone other than you tagged this

Tags can also be voted down, by mousing over the tag, and clicking the red "thumbs down" icon. This takes one vote away from this tag. If a tag gets enough down votes, that tag will be removed.

You can only vote for one tag, once.

What's this multi-select mode thing all about?Top

On each page of images, and on the browse page, in the top right corner, is the "multi-select mode" tool. This lets you select many items at once, and do Stuff with them, such as add them to a zip to download, or add them to your list of faves.

To turn multi-select mode on, click on the multi-select mode area, then drag the "rubber-band" over the stuff you want to select (images in a thumbnail gallery, or search results on the browse page). To start the rubber-band, you can click and drag from an image, or the white-space between images. As you drag, the background of the items included turns grey, to indicate it will be selected. When you stop dragging, the "current selection" count is updated.

The rubber-band is great for selecting stuff that is side by side, but if you want to select things that are spread over the page, hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard (command-click on Macs), and click individually on items you want to add. You can rubber-band some stuff, then individually select some stuff, then rubber-band some more stuff, so long as you keep holding down the CTRL key (command-click on Macs). You can even navigate through multiple pages, across multiple shoots (for example, to download all your selected images from all shoots added this week), in one zip file.

You can now do Stuff with that selection:

• If images have been selected, you can download them as a custom zip by simply clicking the "download n images" button in the multi-select mode tool.
• Add those things to your faves list, by clicking the ♥ icon beside the entity count. Each time you see that entity on the site, the ♥ icon will show beside it, and you can show all faves (♥-tagged things) from the My Account page.
• Click on the number of selected items, to see them all on the browse page
• Clear the selection if you made a mistake, or have done what you wanted to do.
  
  When you have finished selecting and doing stuff with selections, simply click on the multi-select mode header button again, and it will close up, ready for the next time you need it.
  

How does the search bar work?Top

On every page, you'll see our search bar. It looks like this:

Simply click in the search box (like google), type what you're looking for, and press "enter" on your keyboard, or click the magnifying glass icon.

We provide some help - if you type the first few letters of a model's name (or a tag), wait a moment, a small list pops up of things that match - suggestions. For example, in this example below, we typed just "chr", and you can see all the models whose name starts with those letters.

Click what you want to search for, and click the magnifying glass icon.

You can add additional search terms in the search box, separated by commas. A search like this:

Big breasts

Will search for things tagged with "big breasts", but not "big", or "breasts" alone. A search for:

Big breasts, small feet, outside

Will return all things tagged with "big breasts" OR "small feet" OR "outside". You can do AND searching (eg: "only show me models who have big breasts AND small feet AND outside") on the Browse page, _using filters_.

Hey! What happened to all my Lists?!Top

Lists were a system in our old site for our customers to make collections of content.

All the data in your Lists has been preserved and is available from the My Lists page which can be accessed via the My Account menu in the control panel at the top right of your screen as well as via a sidebar in the My Account page.

However, we will no longer support making new Lists - this function will be replaced entirely by the new tags system.

To convert a CMS1 List of yours into tags, simply follow the instructions below. We recommend you practice on a small amount of items first, to get comfortable with the system.

1. Go to My Account, Preferences, number of results, browse/search, and set it to 100. This will make it easier to tag many items.
2. View the list you want to convert to tags (My account, View my Lists, click the list you want; the results show on the Browse page). Note that a list can take up to 30 seconds to load. Please be patient.
3. Turn Multi-Select mode on (more info on that in the Multi-select mode FAQ answer).
4. Drag to select all the items in your list. Notice the count in the Multi-Select mode box increases, and the background changes to a darker grey indicating they are selected. If the results span several pages, navigate to the next page, and repeat the process for as many pages as there are results.
5. Once all the results are selected, click the TAG icon in the multi-select mode tool, for the type of thing you have been selecting, and type in the tag. This may be the same as the List name you used previously, or not. You may wish to precede it with your username, or some other unique identifier.
6. Click "Add tag". The tag you typed will be applied to all selections of that type. You can tag additional things with the same tag, then search for that tag to see only those items.
   
   In the future, we'll be adding a feature to show only your tags, and many other tag features.

Where did MyAW go?Top

MyAW is now My Account. You can get to it from the right-hand top corner of any page.

I don't like the new all-white background. Can you please change it back to the lovely blue?Top

We will not be changing the site background to the blue colour of our old site. In fact, there is very little white in our new design, it's mostly shades of grey. We did this deliberately, to draw a user's eye to the only colour on the page, the images from shoots, of our lovely models.

It was a big change for us as well, but after a few weeks we got used to it, and now the old site looks dim and boring. We hope you'll give it a go for a while, and come to like it as much as we do.