Here are some thoughts I have about why I don’t like reading some comics that are out there.


Navigation
I don’t like not being able to find the navigation. Two things I want my eyes to focus on when I’m on your site, the comic and the navigation, I want to find those effortlessly. If the navigation is under all the comments, forget it. I’m not reading your comic no matter how good it is.

Content in sidebars
Content in sidebars. If it looks like a cluttered mess of images that advertisements that bounce around I wont care whats in them and consider the site ‘needs work’. This can be fixed by making it so that the images and graphics don’t look like jagged pieces of blocks, organize them so they flow down the sidebars. I like it when people have the content in sidebars within the content, that’s the ONLY place I consider centering is a good thing, otherwise don’t center anything.

Massive Headers
Scrolling down an entire screens width to find the comic, ugh .. hate that. I know you like your header being 600px high with full of the entire cast and some random message … and I’m glad you do, your not making the comic for me to read your doing it for you. .. I’m just saying I think it would be best if you kinda thought of someone besides yourself and made it so that people can get to the comic without having to scroll down too much, 80-120px high headers are pretty much all you need.

Centering in blog & comment areas
Are we back to centering again? Yeah I think we are. I WANT to read your blogposts after reading the daily update, I do, I enjoy it, but hell if I’m going to do it when the content area for your blogposts and comments are centered in anywhere, at all. Forget centering, knock it off, it’s lame, my learning to read is based off the left side of the page to the right. (if English site)

Embedded videos
*ANY Embedded video’s that have to ‘connect’ to someplace.’
i.e. livestream/ustream. I abhor waiting another 30 seconds for it to connect to load the index page. I’m not coming back to your site to deal with that.

Consistent Bad News
Lots of blog posts with bad news. I hate bad news, I come to read comics to escape from my already miserable life, the trouble is I’m empathetic to peoples problems and they drop on my shoulders as well. Don’t change your ways and stop doing this on my account but seriously, if I can help you with whatever going on that is a problem I want to. This is a personal issue of mine where I guess I want to redeem myself for all the bad things I’ve done but still. If you repeatedly do it over and over again on your site without any good news or happiness it sucks and I hate that and don’t want to come back to your site to read because it’s just too much emotional crap for me.

Hiatus
I hate it when people say they’re going on hiatus, hiatus means your not coming back; that has been the way it’s been for every site that says they’re going on hiatus. Use the word “break” instead. You’re going to take a 2 month break, mention something about a filler comic once in awhile, otherwise I’ll never return to your site to read it when it comes back.

Advertisement Extremists
I know you want to earn some money for having a comic on the net, you want to try to make a living for it sure ya do, but seriously, 30 advertisements making .05 cents each on a daily basis? uh .. no. You can earn much more money by having a clean site with the advertisements in better places and a huge reduction in them. If your comic is really worth it, people will pay good money to have an ad *next* to your comic, you don’t need so many.

Color Schemes
What the hell were you thinking with the color scheme? I don’t know about you but if the brightness of the outside area of the comic is brighter then the inside area of the comic I can just scream. It’s annoying to go to a website where the colors and graphics are so bad to look at that I can’t focus on the comic. You really should ask more people their opinions on the site design and do NOT be afraid of asking for help, people LIKE helping, its a human nature to help, it takes less effort to help then it would to be angry and more people would be happy.

Author Congeniality
Never responding to peoples comments, I dislike that. People are taking time to read your comic at least respect them enough to respond back publicly. Joe Author has just gained +1 faction with WebComic Readers.