When reading a comic, I dislike…
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.
Great article, Phil.
True, HIATUS is a nasty word: it’s usually politespeak for “the beginning of the end”. To any webcomic creators considering going on hiatus, make sure you give your readers a concrete deadline of when you’re coming back, and stick to it! Otherwise, your traffic will fall off quickly, and may take squillions of years to recover, if it ever will.
I agree with you on all these points.
When I come to a comic site, I am there to read the comic first & foremost.
Also, if you post a link to your comic somewhere, post a link that goes TO THE COMIC.
Nothing annoys me more than following a link and then having to hunt around on the site to find the comic.
If I like what I see in the comic and your site feels usable, I will then check out other things on the site, like the blog, etc.
Also – please do not hide the “next / previous” comic buttons on the site.
If I am a new or irregular visitor, i will probably want to see other work you have done.
Please don’t make me fight to find it – put it under or above the comic (or both!)
Phew! Only like 3 or 4 of those things apply to me. Although I DO think my site was like a muse for you writing “Color Schemes”… I almost thought the paragraph would end with “And Also, Bagels is just ONE example of horrible color schemes…”
Bad grammar and spelling. Write the dialogue in a program that will spell-check it for you, or get a friend to play editor (making sure they have better skills than you).
Awful lettering. If I have to struggle to read the dialogue, I won’t bother. There are too many options and examples out there for you to stick with a bad one.
An archive that is user unfriendly. Options are good, but the most important one (and the one that should be your first choice) is the calendar archive, with the most recent first, not last.
Good to know. I don’t think I’m a violator of any of that, lol
Excelent post!
Really agree about the advertisments especially, ok I’m sure a couple of well placed and RELEVANT ads are ok, but there’s so many sites with lots of small ads or those damn teeth whitening adverts!
I agree about the navigation, but that’s something I’ve had little control over on my own comic because it’s hosted on squarespace and I really can’t figure out how to add next/prev/first etc buttons :/
Check, check, check and check! Yes! – DJC passed the Frumph test. Very relieved.
I’m gonna have to agree with pretty much all of what you said.
For me the absolute worse thing are absolutely horribly put together websites that don’t make it 100% clear that they are a comic website, its hard to find navs, theres so much freaking clutter that its near impossible to find ANYTHING, and there no strong sense of anything. I often think the web comic community has become rather trashy but its understandable that not everyone is a web designer, so its good that we have the ComicPress theme for wordpress to make things better (sometimes).
Amen to that~! =)
You have a very good list here. And I also completely agree with what Joenis had to add; I cannot *stand* poorly designed, overly cluttered websites. Sometimes it’s enough to detract so much that, even if the comic is decent enough that I’d come back every now and then, I would still find myself pretty discouraged from being a frequent visitor
And that bit about Hiatus was spot-on. The webcomic community, as a whole, is constantly changing and growing; always moving forward. If you get off the bandwagon to pop a squat in the bushes, even for just a minute, you’re bound to be left behind~! 8D (ie; readership will dramatically decrease)
I’m glad you included that.
Though I DO have to wonder… In terms of the actual content of a comic, what are some of your dislikes where this is concerned? I mean like, plot-wise, artistically, etc. etc. =)
Despite possible being guilty of one or two things on that list, I agree with you 100%.
I go on “break”, but I usually prepare several filler comics that auto-post while I’m gone. Most of these breaks are week-long conventions or moving or I forgot to pay the Comcast bill. So, I always have a store of fillers.
Honestly, before I did the migration to ComicPress, I hated the cluttered feel of my Blogger page. It was really annoying, and Blogger provided no support for navigation, so my comic was at a loss.
I don’t get many comments, but I do respond when I do. I love talking to people, whether they’re trolling my site or genuinely providing some sort of feedback.
I do agree about sites that look like they were built on the MySpace principle of graphic design thrown out the window. Can’t focus if your site hurts my eyes or has a dancing penguin or the footer is riddled with 50+ button ads. I have two ads at the top, one focused on my internal projects (store and Adam Rarnar’s site) and one open to the public. That’s it. The rest are hidden in the Links menu.
I know there’s some of the bigger comics out there that I read that insist on hiding their navigation well below the blog entry, and that’s just really annoying for me. I’ve toyed with navigation placement, but I like the way its laid out right now, so I’m not going to change it. I don’t even know if I have readers, really. I mostly don’t care. I draw for me, mostly.
Well, the solution to Hiatus, is don’t take one. Post sketches, art, 1 page instead of 3, what ever. You need to hold onto the few readers we get. Give em what they came for!
100% agreement with this, .. it’s all about the momentum.. keep it constant
Guilty as charged, sitting quietly in a corner avoiding eye contact….
Very true!
When designing Dumb Nudge for Leen (with your great help), I tried to follow the rules in “How to Make Webcomics”. Seem to be quite the same as your criteria. Thanks!
These are all great & helpful points. I am a text centering person. Maybe I shouldn’t. I must say that I don’t get the Hiatus thing. To me a hiatus is a type of hernia. I agree that break is better.
Replying to comments is I feel important. This is a regular irritation for me. If I regularly visit a site & they never respond to their reader’s comments they eventually lose their spot in my RSS Reader. I think just as important is visiting & commenting on the sites of those who visit & comment on yours. I visit lots of comics & leave comments but many of them never repay the visit. Even if I really like a comic no visits from them to my site after a few weeks usually means an RSS deletion. If someone can’t make the effort to respond with comment replies & visits to their visitors sites then they shouldn’t expect commenters to make the effort either. I often come across many sites with 0 comments for every comic. Probably due to their non-participation on other’s sites.