Wouldn’t it be cool if…

If it ever really existed, information is only hidden or lost until it is found. The internet can be a wondrous place full of awe-inspiring information. But finding that information can be a soul-crushing waste of time that yields nothing but dead ends. Google search is not the ultimate be-all-end-all internet search solution, despite what everyone assumes. It requires careful selection of search phrases and sometimes creative ways to find things buried in the mountainous clouds of STUFF floating around in cyberspace.

After spending hours looking for sources of doll information and searching for active doll communities, only to find defunct websites and lone unmaintained blogs, I stumbled across some Youtube doll videos. They inspired hope but were hard to find, due to Youtube’s unpredictable (and horribly lazy and unfriendly) algorithm. I caught myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Doll Wikipedia where one could find everything related to dolls – basic answers about maintaining a collection, fixing broken dolls, how to start customizing, how to identify dolls … basically everything anyone ever wanted to know about dolls?”

As a doll collector and hobbyists, I know how difficult it is to find one place to get answers to all the questions that pop up about maintaining a doll collection. Sure, there is a FANDOM site with wiki pages for popular doll brands that offer fan-collected information about doll release series and cartoon tie-ins for merchandising. And there are various sites where doll enthusiasts who already know each other can message each other, exchange advice and tips, and share pictures of their personal treasures. (Well, it looks as though there’s only ONE site now, that is still active – DollDivas.com.) There are also individual blog sites where collectors share their discoveries and acquisitions, personal thoughts on collecting, as well as links to other collectors’ blogs that they know and like. But it’s all scattered across the nether regions of the internet, with none of it connected and catalogued in a centralized way that makes it easy for beginners or outsiders to research obscure and hard-to-find doll information.

Narrowing the scope. I enjoy looking at beautiful, interesting, thought-provoking, and well-staged doll photographs. I am a sucker for doll repaint and customizing videos, as well as fix-it videos and videos featuring new techniques to accomplish a variety of creative tasks involved with repairing and modifying dolls. But as for dolls in general, my main focus is one-sixth-scale fashion dolls. I can marvel at the engineering of a Smart Doll or the ethereal beauty of a ball-jointed doll, but I have no interest in collecting dolls larger than one-sixth-scale. I don’t have the room or the money for that, and I feel that the smaller one-sixth-scale size is easier for handling and display – although it’s a challenge sometimes to create realistic clothing and accessories to scale. But for the sake of size, I’m sticking with one-six-scale fashion dolls.

I know there are many other types of dolls and toys out there that people love and collect – antique dolls, souvenir and international dolls, baby dolls, reborns, toddler and child-type dolls, static figures, plastic painted action figures, and bobbleheads and other oddly proportioned or cartoony figures. The list seems endless. But if for me, one-six-scale fashion dolls is my focus. While I did develop a secondary interest in action figures, that happened mainly because of my interest in articulation and posing ability. Most fashion doll manufacturers have now mastered articulation to the point that preference for fashion dolls over action figures is mainly an issue of aesthetics and purpose of play.

“I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”
― Neal Shusterman, Unwind

When I conceptualized the DOLL-WORLD website, I had grand plans to create something that had never been done before on the scale I envisioned. My dream was to create a nexus platform for the doll community, where doll enthusiasts of every stripe could come and find camaraderie and information. I realize now, three years later, that I was naively ambitious, thinking somehow I’d be able to bring my overarching vision to life and accomplish what others had tried but fallen short in attempting to do. I had some inkling of how intricately difficult it was to design and build a complex multi-function website and have it actually work, but I dived in headfirst anyway. While the tools I have at my disposal now are probably much more sophisticated and user-friendly than those available to the doll enthusiasts responsible for previous efforts in cataloguing and centralizing doll information, my skill level certainly is not. Nevertheless, I felt that somehow my dream would be realized. I guess that’s what they all thought too.

I spent a very long time compiling and composing information I felt would be essential and useful to the average fashion doll enthusiast. I did extensive research and wrote detailed articles about basic concepts as well as overviews of complicated techniques. I tried to build in web functions like discussion forums, resource pages, and self-maintained gallery pages where members could upload their own content without my intervention.

The day I received an email reminder from my web hosting service that my domain was again up for renewal, I woke up and realized I had spent the last three years doing a lot of work but accomplishing absolutely nothing. I was just chopping wood. I finally faced the fact that right now, all my plans were too complicated for me to put together and make it all work smoothly. For three years I had postponed making the website go live, and had stalled the primary objective of building a website in the first place – to create an online store where I could pare down my overgrown doll collection and place items with others who would want and appreciate them. Because of my obsessive rabbit-hole research and content creation and desire to make things bigger and better, I’d fallen woefully short of the goal. I hadn’t achieved anything real.

I had failed.

But I wasn’t giving up.

In admitting that stark truth, I knew I had to cut back on content and functionality so I could at least get the basic website up and running. So here I am, back at square one, streamlining a bloated non-functioning website, while the rest of what I wanted to accomplish still remains on my wishlist.

Redesigning my website. I haven’t entirely abandoned my wishlist for a comprehensive multi-featured online community platform to serve the doll community at large. I’ve just had to put some things on the back burner in order to focus on primary objectives. The current redesign will include…

• Online store – A single store selling my dolls and accessories, with sales, discount, and coupon features.
• Resource section – Pages with basic doll information that may be of interest to the casual or beginner doll collector, as well as more detailed information for those looking for help fixing, refurbishing, or customizing dolls.
• Forum – A message board for members to communicate and offer help with doll-related questions. The structure and function is intact but awaits actual members to be a viable messaging system.
• Website newsletter subscription – An email subscription newsletter than notifies of new additions to the website, such as new or ongoing sales, new blog articles, new products, new site functionality or features, etc.

Redesigning my web wishlist. My wishlist, for now, consists of features and functions I had partly incorporated in the website but needed to scale back or deactivate, as well as features I never got around to figuring out how to accomplish. These features would serve the needs of a virtual doll community platform as a centralized place for doll enthusiasts to share information and doll treasures online. It would be a place that is stable, well-known, well-maintained, curated, and easy to find and come back to.

I know there are already many internet resources and social media platforms for doll enthusiasts to share doll information, such as personal blogs, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Ebay, Etsy, and Facebook groups. But each platform is specifically tailored to offer only certain slices of content with levels and kinds of services that either have a lot of overlap or differ so greatly that they are like different species in the social media landscape. Some platforms are great for posting random pictures in a time stream, while others are better suited to archival curation of pictures with little or no communication. Blogs can provide a platform for individual ideas and information, with only limited community interaction. I want DOLL-WORLD to provide the best of what most of those platforms offer, but be geared strictly for the community service of doll enthusiasts and crafters. Essential features I want to build in an easy-navigating website with a generic but attractive design will include:

• Blog sharing. A shared blog format for doll enthusiasts who’d rather “guest blog” than try to maintain their own blog week after week, month after month. It’s difficult to come up with new and fresh information on your own to maintain a blog without letting it take over your life and become a dreaded chore. Many bloggers lose interest after a while when their blog posts get very few or no reactions or comments. In order to attract visitors, they find themselves getting sucked up in self-promotion that takes time and energy better spent doing other things. A shared blog or guest blog solves many of those problems by spreading out the workload among several people, with the added benefit of different styles of writing and more sources for ideas and content. Archival search capability would help ensure articles can be found later for repeat enjoyment or discovery by new members. Additional functionality would be needed to allow established members to post their own articles. Also, the success of blog-sharing depends on the availability and willingness of people to actually share the responsibility of writing and posting articles. So, for now, the blog on DOLL-WORLD remains a solitary responsibility relegated to wishlist status for future modification.
• Help and discussion messaging forum. The forum function with membership capability is already designed and implemented. However, it is useless space without a community to use it. It remains in wishlist status until community membership grows to the point that the forum shows self-maintained participation. At that time, the message forum help center would be monitored by knowledgeable doll enthusiasts. A moderated chat-messaging function would allow community members to interact and offer advice on specific topics related to dolls. To help maintain membership participation, moderators would likely need to sponsor monthly “challenges” and similar activities.
• Tutorials. A resource section already exists in the website but contains only overview and tips articles. The addition of how-to tutorials and DIY project tutorials with downloadable printouts and patterns would create a higher level of help and information. Members could upload their own projects independently to share with other doll collectors on the site. Video capability would allow tutorials to be uploaded onto other platforms for additional exposure to attract more people to the community. The added functionality of making the tutorials searchable by keywords and indexed by topics would make existing and future content more accessible and useful.
• A curated gallery. Indexed gallery pages with the ability for members to upload their own doll photos would be available for sharing and general enjoyment. The gallery could be organized by member and/or by topic. Adding attribute “tags” to photos would make galleries searchable. As community participation grows, monthly “tag” challenges could be offered for community members to produce and post specific doll topic pictures such as “Rainy Days”, “Redheads”, or “The Color Purple.”
• Expanding the community scope. Knowing most doll collectors don’t focus on just one type or scale of doll, the site could be expanded to include enthusiasts of other doll types and scales, with content sections specific to each type. Knowledge from various collector experts would be essential to put this expansion into practice.
• A buy-sell-trade forum. Most doll enthusiasts are always on the lookout for a new doll treasure, or find themselves in the position of having to pare down their collection. A platform that serves this community must also offer a safe and trusted environment. A message board for private independently monitored and vetted transactions is essential for a multi-function community platform vision.
• Fee-based sub-vendor sales through DOLL-WORLD. As part of the multi-function platform, sales of others’ items (custom made clothing and other repeatable items) would be made available. Details are flexible, but items for sale would need to be vetted and shipped to the DOLL-WORLD location for shipping with other items when orders are completed. A flat percentage fee would be charged per sold item to cover processing costs (product photos, shipping, payment fees, etc.).
• Marketplace selling. For doll collectors experienced at selling, an individual store under the DOLL-WORLD umbrella store is a great alternative to the ongoing expense and headache of maintaining a personal ecommerce website. This would function similar to a personalized store in the Etsy or Ebay commercial marketplace. While commercial platforms like Etsy and Ebay can attract a large potential customer base, competition is fierce because these site are overwhelmed by vendors selling items in every category imaginable, and sales exposure is almost impossible to achieve for a small vendor just starting out. Also there’s the issue of arbitrary rules imposed on all sellers, like “suggested” free shipping, the cost of which many small sellers cannot afford to absorb, not to mention the high cost of listing and sales fees. Marketing – the chore of attracting visitors and potential buyers to a personal website usually involves social media blitzes or ad buys that can prove to be a waste of time and money for most independent sellers offering unique items to a specific small segment of customers. With a marketplace store in a one-stop “doll mall” dedicated to the type of products doll collectors want, marketing would be a community effort by word of mouth and community association – as long as membership is strong and thriving.

Letting go. Letting go of the idea of creating a be-all-end-all doll community is disheartening but also liberating, because I can focus on the priorities that originally prompted this whole endeavor. As promised, the wishlist is not gone and not forgotten. It is just put on hold until the main website is up and running, and I see some actual membership interest in this platform. Hopefully all you doll enthusiasts out there with visions of your own will band together so we can all make something worthwhile out of the thin air of the internet.