OK. I'll bite, as this is a field with which I have a little experience.
Depending on your level of expertise and/or patience, posting your collection online can be both an excellent way to further your enjoyment of your collection, and to help both other collectors and the hobby in general. It's a great way to not only show-off your stuff, but to attract a younger audience that lives in a digital world.
Speaking from only my experience, I enjoy my collection much more because of my efforts to put it online, and it gives me opportunities to contribute to the hobby even when, like now, I'm without possession of my physical collection for years at a time (I didn't trust the movers to move it on my last move, so I left it in secure storage).
That being said, it's definitely not something I would recommend for everyone. Even with years of experience, building and maintaining a site can be frustrating at times, and very time consuming. It really depends on how complex/basic it is, and how much work you put into designing a good, solid framework.
For example, a basic site that simple shows scans of your album pages is really easy, cheap (can be free), and requires very little work to update. It's also very upgrade-proof (meaning, it's so simple that it's hard to break it as software changes over the years). The downside is that the same lack of complexity that makes it easy also limits its functionality. As long as you accept it for what it is, it's a great basic solution.
On the other hand, if you decide to get fancy, you can greatly increase the complexity and add a bunch of features, but at the cost of time, money, effort, and sometimes sanity.
My own story....
When I initially decided to put my collection online back around 2006ish, it was pretty basic. I did use a content management system (ExpressionEngine), so it wasn't flat-HTML-level basic, but barely a step above. There were no features other than a menu and flat pages showing scans of stamps with a little text.
In 2015, I rolled out version 2.0 of my site, changing over to a more robust content management system (Wordpress) with thousands of plugins, giving me the option to add new features like being able to search the collection.
However, with each step-up, the investment became larger. Custom coding that required maintenance with every Wordpress/plugin upgrade, plugins that required $, etc. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
Finally, I'm over 1,000 hours into version 3.0 of my site, which thanks to my inability to travel at the moment, I hope to have finished within the next month or so. I'm still using Wordpress, though with the addition of Divi to implement better templating (essential when the site contains over 1,300 individual pages), and changes to make it far more upgrade-proof. Plus, I'm finally making it fully responsive, which was always a problem with older versions. A little preview (click to enlarge):
A sample page for a single set -
A new, filter-based way to search the collection -
Details popup from the search screen -
Bottom line - I would encourage anyone who's interested to start small, figure out where you want to find your balance in terms of effort/cost vs. end product, and don't be afraid to put something out there and experiment.
Posted 03/24/2020 12:22 pm
