Queer Comics Database
For my last year at the University of Washington's Information School, my Capstone partner Le Button and I developed an online database for discovering comics, graphic novels, webcomics, and more that feature LGBTQIA representation. Our goal was to create a tool that centered the needs of our three user groups: librarians, comic retailers, and readers.
To this end, we worked closely with our user groups, conducting surveys and interviews with dozens of potential users to understand their needs as far as taxonomies and database features. We then built a draft of the database, which we refined through usability testing with our target users.
The result uses WordPress as a content management system because I knew many of the features we desired—flexible taxonomies, user comments, a user-friendly backend—would come with WordPress but that it would allow enough customization to suit our specific needs. Our theme was built as a child theme of GeneratePress, with custom post types to represent Series and Volume entities, custom taxonomies and meta data fields, and additional filtering options written in HTML, CSS, and PHP.
The database officially launched on March 25, 2018 and can be viewed at queercomicsdatabase.com.