I love it when ideas and events converge and result in revelation.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been hip deep in web work, reacquainted with old friends HTML and CSS, and getting to know some newcomers, PHP and Javascript, whom I can’t quite talk to on my own yet but look forward to becoming more familiar with as time goes on.
As I was culling my archives for blogging material this week, I revisited a six-month old post from the 37signals blog that was comparing real-world experience of working in web design to the ideals written about in 37signals’ book Getting Real, a very good collection of essays and philosophies on the subjects of business, marketing, programming and design.
This sparked a bit of a chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment in my thinking about this particular website and the many purposes and functions it serves.
Lately, I’ve been focusing some attention on Q-Burger.com, but I’m about to ratchet up the intensity some. I’m not talking about the content, blog and comic, but the site itself. Specifically, its role, its purpose, and how well it’s fulfilling its duties as a platform for my content and my audience on the internet.
The ‘web’ in webcomic
It’s easier to just focus on the content and ignore things like the interface, the look, and organization. It’s tempting to keep hanging onto the default (and quite decent) WordPress template that Mike Sisk provided with Inkblot. But is that really what’s going to best serve the website of a webcomic?
I don’t think so.
In my experience with clients while working as a freelance writer and maker of websites, the complexity that hides in just a simple five or six page site is pretty amazing. And this website has many more moving parts and dimensions, and potential moving parts and dimensions than your typical static five page site.
Site as printing press
A blog is both a publication platform and a publication. It’s the printing press and book in one entity.
Thankfully, WordPress takes care of most of the printing press aspect for me and presents a fairly nice interface for publishing text and images, and then Sisk’s Webcomic plug-in handles the comic publishing and presentation. All-in-all, a pretty nice experience.
But does this system give me the flexibility to publish comics that are of a different aspect ratio? That’s something I’m likely going to be doing. I’m also considering publishing “issues”, or collections of four or six comic pages, on a monthly basis. Is this possible? Of course it’s possible, but is it feasible for someone at my technical level do it?
Site as publication
As an analogue to a paper and ink book or comic, my site needs to be as easy to use or at least as intuitive as a physical object. The bare bones of the user interface is there, the comic navigation, the menus, the graphic design, but is it as smooth and seamless as it could be?
Are potential readers leaving because they can’t figure out how to read the previous week’s episode or get to the previous chapter? Is it as pleasant and natural to use as a dead tree version would be? Is it better?
Thinking of the audience
Moving beyond just the publishing and consumption of content, a good webcomic website should be constructed in such a way that content and code work together to be included in relevant search results and therefore bring in new readers.
Comments and forum software give the audience a way to communicate with the creator that’s unique to the web. Easy to use, relevant and spam-free comments and forum topics are a big part of most successful sites.
Many challenges lie ahead, no doubt. There’s no real hurry, no real deadlines or external motivation for making this happen, simply the desire to have the best site possible, and the midnight anxiety that follows this desire. But I think it’s important, especially for a one-man show like Q-Burger, to take the time to step back and look at the big picture, because it’s really very easy to just put your head down and miss it.
