Rat Creature's Journal

I've barely gotten used to the deviantArt site arrangements (I whined about my problems navigating dA before), and now they changed their profile page layout and added new modules and widgets and stuff. Meep. It's not that I think it's worse than before, actually I haven't used it long enough yet to decide whether its functionality improved or not, it's just that I had a hard time with the site to begin with, and now they changed things on me, when I've just mostly knew where what was.

OTOH you find cool things there, like this comic page by ursulav, an excerpt of a hypothetical comic from a children's book. I now want this "Empire of Feathers" comic about "an alternate universe where birds ruled the world, and it was dark and gritty and had lots of battle scenes and intrigue and poisonings and magic, and a clan of rooster assassins that wore cloaks made of their victim's feathers" to really exist so badly. Assassin roosters!

I was in the mood to look at some fanart and decided to browse deviantArt, also wondering whether it might be good as another place to post my stuff. So I just went to the site, and previously I've always followed links to an artist or a picture, and I wasn't too thrilled with the site design then, but on that level it works okay. But how does anyone cope with this site design on a more general level? Or is it just me? It drives me crazy. Though I guess you get used to everything eventually, right?

Of course it could be worse. DA has at least general categories, and fanart is separate (though it would help if the individual fandoms were separated more as well but I guess it's because it's more general use, not just fandom), and there is a search engine, but I still find DA hard to use. For example I found out that the group accounts I have seen linked actually don't exist officially in the site's infrastructure. That I learned from the FAQ after I had been looking like for ten minutes or so to find a section for group galleries (I thought it might be easier to find fandoms that way), and was completely baffled. Apparently they exist unofficially through more than one person using an account somehow. At least that explains why these groups aren't more common. I expect it must be rather nightmarish from a maintenance and security standpoint for group owners to have to share the main password and not have different right levels or something like that.

Still, those of you more familiar with the site, do you recommend getting an account there? Is the function where you watch artists userfriendly? Does posting stuff there reach a different audience than LJ or is more of a wash? I mean, I'd cope with obnoxious interfaces for the potential of even a small amount of extra feedback. *g* Any opinions on the site?