Why: If you read my last two posts (or at least the forewords), then you know I was planning to read El Goonish Shive this weekend and then write about it for an instalment of this liveblog. When I was about two thirds of the way through the archive, the comic’s server threw errors and then went down. After a brief moment of confusion, this made me very, very... irritated (no I do not like cliff hangers, why do you ask?). Since I was home alone at the time (i.e. no one to call me crazy for talking to myself) I started ranting out loud about webcomic websites. My irritation at unreliable servers somehow shifted to loudly and angrily detailing every flaw in every webcomic’s website that I could remember/think of/plausibly invent and claim was true. This was probably made considerably worse by the fact that I spent six months doing a web design course not too long ago and so have a very definite idea of what is wrong and what is right. Since I have still not caught up to date with EGS, you get to read that rant! Enjoy.
WARNING:' The following is an angry, sarcastic and mostly irrelevant rant. You can safely ignore it if you feel so inclined.
Webcomics are called webcomics because they appear on the web. This means they are shown on these magical things called webpages. Which also appear on the web. I would mark those sentences with a captain obvious pot hole, except apparently some people can’t grasp the simple fact that web pages are very, very important to web comics!
Completely ignoring the comic itself, the website associated with it is the single most important thing. It determines how interested your audience is, how easily your comic is found and navigated and how interested your audience is. There are certain principles and features of websites that are recognised as Good Things by a majority of people. These are not arbitrary. They are not silly or irrelevant. And in a perfect world, they would not be ignored.
The following are things which are important for webcomic websites, and yet have very little to do with the comic itself:
Navigation!
Words fail to describe the importance of navigation. If your site has crappy navigation, chances are you are better off without a site in the first place. Every single page, no matter how far into the site, no matter the content of the particular page, MUST have a way of navigating to and from it. This is even more important when you bring in the webcomic itself. If someone looks at your webcomic’s site for the very first time they should immediately be able to tell:- Where they are
- Where they can go
- How to get to the home page
- How to get back where they just were (if it was also on the site)
- What the content of the page is
When dealing with webcomics, a few additional requirements are added:
- What strip am I currently looking at?
- How can I see the strip that preceded this one?
- How can I see the next?
- How do I see the first?
- How do I see the last?
- How do I return to this strip later?
- How can I find a certain strip?
- How do I find the archives?
Reading that list above, you might think that those features are common sense. As always, the internet proves you wrong. If you can tick off all those points above, you’re probably set as far as navigation. If, however, I cannot find a way to go from strip #1 to strip #2 without going through four other pages, then you are doing something wrong. I’m not making this up. I cannot for the life of me remember what comic it was, but I eventually discovered that the lack of a ‘Next’ button meant that I had to use Archive->Year->Month->Strip to go from one strip to the next. That is bad design on a scale I have trouble comprehending.
And make your buttons obvious as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing ‘Next’ on your ‘Next’ button. It seems pretty obvious in fact. How good-looking and fancy the button is doesn’t matter a whole lot if you can’t tell what it does. Great, there’s a swirly thing that look like a treble clef on its side. WHAT DOES IT DO?!
Worse (arguably) are buttons whose purpose seems obvious, but actually isn’t. Thanks in part to VHS remote controls, the majority of people recognise two arrows facing to the left (eg <<) as either ‘rewind’ or ‘backward’. With webcomics, while by no means a set rule, it is generally expected that a double left arrow (eg <<) will take you to the first comic. The exception to this is when there are triple or quadruple arrows (<<< or <<<<), in which case whichever has the most ‘<’s is expected to be the ‘First’ button. Subverting (or, god forbid, inverting) this is not clever, nor funny. It is confusing as all hell. SO DON’T DO IT!
TITLE YOUR STRIPS!
One of the hardest, or at least most time consuming, parts of writing this liveblog is going on an archive trawl for specific strips to use as examples. When strips either have no title, or only have a date/time identifier, then the process gets even longer. This is where titles come in. It doesn’t even take much effort, damn it! For god’s sake, use a simple page number and you’ll be fine! I mean, which is easier to remember, “strip #30” or “the strip from august 17th, 2008”? (If you answered with the latter, then your memory is clearly much better than mine is)But why stop at simple numbers? Why, you could divide it into arcs, chapters, hell, if you have enough you could even divide it into books! Now I can hear you asking, “Why would I do this?” Because it requires damn near no effort and yet makes every single strip readily identifiable and far, far easier to find.
Seriously, just use a god damn page number and I’m happy. Why, why don’t people use a god damn page number... *Breaks down in angry tears*
ARCHIVES ARE NOT CALENDARS!
Barring holiday specials, 99% of comic strips have nothing to do with the day they were released. So why are readers expected to magically know what day a comic was released on?Displaying by book/chapter/page? Perfect. Pairing a date with a page number/title? Adequate. Relying on dates alone? No, just... no.
THE CONCLUSION? Websites are important. Even for a webcomic. Even if it is the greatest webcomic in the history of the internet, it ain’t worth shit if the site sucks balls!
It was around the point I started swearing and using non-existent words like “ain’t” that I began trying to distract myself from my anger. I did this by opening TV Tropes and clicking ‘Random’ a lot until I found something interesting. I feel bad for subjecting you to that angry outburst, so I’ll tell you that that ‘something interesting’ was Badly Drawn Kitties and that I’ll write a proper (as in not a pointless rant) installment about it next Friday.
/rant
Thank you for enduring that needlessly pointless, rage-induce rant. I won’t do it again. Promise.
