I expect Rob will chase me down with a tire-iron for hijacking his article space.
Lately I've done several reviews for webcomics using the publishing platform
Wordpress as a base, along with some kind of addon to make comic publishing easier. With each review I've become a little more outspoken about the practice, such as 'It doesn't look bad for a Wordpress site' or 'You can tell at a glance it's a Wordpress site.'
To clarify a little bit, it's not that you get 'points off' for using Wordpress as your publishing platform, it's just that reviewing Wordpress websites has become something akin to walking through a development neighborhood with all those cookie-cutter houses and trying to do reviews on them. Yes, the lawns are a bit different, the paint's a different shade, certainly the furniture is arranged differently, but they're all the same house! Over and over and over.
Granted, I am not an expert on what Wordpress' limitations are, if any. I
have at least seen the control panel, and yeah, altering things looks daunting. Still, it would be nice to see some creativity in design, instead of just slight variations of the default theme. Wordpress has a nice looking default theme, but with so many instances of it out there it gets pretty boring.
I'm going to make a suggestion for all those budding webcomickers out there, as well as you established ones. You're artists. You have creative minds. Put some of that creativity into your display medium... your website. There are many artists out there who will tell you the frame is as important as the painting, how and where the picture is hung directly affects its creative message. Your website is both your comic's frame and your chosen place for hanging it.
Visit these sites, please:
Open DesignsGet Free Web DesignsBoth of those sites offer numerous ( hundreds ) of web designs as templates which can be freely downloaded and modified to use on your own site, with nothing asked in return other than attribution. Just tell people where you got the design. Browse the templates, click on them to get full views, spend time with other artist's creativity to give a jolt to your own. You might come up with something really beautiful.
Recently I did a review of J. Gray's webcomic
Mysteries of the Arcana. I withheld review numbers due to my involvement as a go-to source for suggestions and technical help. I can tell you honestly if I were to give the site an overall review score it would have to be 9.5, or really close to that magically elusive 10. Why? Because J. Gray spent a good amount of time designing every bit of that site. He worried over how each element looked and worked with his comic, for weeks, and worked to be sure it worked well. That makes his website unique. It definitely affects the feeling you get when reading.
Nobody expects you to be a webmaster, or to spend months studying how to write code into the wee hours of the morning. Help is out there, oftentimes very reasonably priced or even free if you have friends who might know a little coding. J. Gray enlisted help from his team and friend Roxie, who happens to know code. ( I don't know her website or I would link it here ). The point is it's not as hard as it first looks, and the end product will more than likely justify the extra effort.
Should you bother putting that extra effort into your website? Certainly you can argue that some successful webcomics use pretty basic Wordpress themes and have plenty of readers. This is true. Would they do better if they had nicer websites to display their offerings? I'd like to think so. Think about it, do you get a better experience going with your friends to a nice, new theater with surround sound and comfy seats to watch a movie, or is it better to watch it on a crappy 17 inch TV while sitting on a stool? It's the same movie, after all.
Your website is the same as your webcomic art and story. The more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it. And on a personal note, the more I'll enjoy reviewing it.
~Dragon~