Brad Guigar on Webcomics, from a Q&A during Chicago Comic Con, 2013 from Brad Guigar on Vimeo.
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One of the most vexing problems I’ve faced in moving to a WordPress-based conent-management system (CMS) has been trying to administer design changes to my site using CSS.
So I was really thrilled to hear that Philip M. Hofer, creator of Comic Easel, has released a nifty Child Theme that enables the user to make text- and background-color changes in a simple push-button interface.
;)
You don’t need to know CSS to make these changes. Simply select the element you’d like to tweak, choose a color, and click Apply. Easy peasy.
Hofer is making the Child Theme available as a digital download on his site for $15. (Click the link to learn more about how Sandbox works.)
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If you want to improve your ad revenue, fix your broken links.
Broken links bring your Google PageRank down, and advertisers prefer sites with high PageRank scores. (And so do search engines.)
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For this round of Hot Seat critiques, I wanted to focus on social media. I attribute a huge portion of the success I had with my recent Kickstarter on the effect of social media. It’s how information gets passed around, and I think it’s worth spending a little time discussing.
So here’s the three criteria I focused on:
I gave each a score on a five-star scale, with five stars representing the best possible outcome.
As always, this is just the beginning of the discussion. Members are encouraged to take this as a jumping-off point to a deeper discussion of the topic.
I was able to easily find the link to the MeatShield Facebook fan page, but I was disappointed that there was no presence of any of the other prominant social media — especially Twitter. And I don’t see any way to share links to this comic through social media. That means if I come to today’s comic and love it, I can’t easily share that love. And, being a typical member of the attention-disorder-ridden Internet public, if I can’t do it now, I’m not very likely to remember to do it later.
Visually, the fan page for Meatshield is bare bones. Although Facebook has an option for a large image across the top, Meatshield only uses a small profile picture. But the posts themselves feature a decent mix of promotional and fun content. There are posts about the creator’s personal life, and there are posts that are clearly aimed at the Meatshield demographic. And, interspersed with those are promos for the comic. Not bad at all.
Suggestion: Add Twitter. And add sharing. This is a WordPress site so perhaps a plug-in such as JetPack would be a good start.
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I almost missed the text-only link to the creator’s Facebook fan page. As Internet users, we’re kinda trained to see those familiar social-media icons. I think it’s a good idea to use that repeated symbology to your advantage. The white “f” reversed out of a blue box is instantly recognizable. The word “Facebook” gets completely lost.
There’s no ability to share my fandom of this comic with anyone through social media on this site.
Although there is an attractive facebook fan page for the comic, the posts are almost entirely promotional — with very little representing the “social” aspect of social media.
There’s a small link to the Facebook fan page for Johnny Saturn, but it’s well below the first-screen view, so it may as well not be there at all. I might experiment adding the Facebook “f” to the column of icons to the right of the comic.
This comic has a row of social-media icons, but the links are too far away from the comic to be useful. I’d like to see them right under the comic. Perhaps using this method would help.
Although the page itself is attractive, I’d like to see a better content-to-promotion ratio on the Facebook fan page. Almost all of the posts promote updates and merchandise. But there’s no outreach — no conversation-starting or community building. And there are no posts more recent than mid-July. I will say that I like that some of the promotion is pretty savvy. For example, some of the posts share scans of commissioned art as a way of promoting the fact that it’s possible to purchase commissioned art. But overall, I’d like to see a little more fun talk.
Ten things you can do to improve your webcomic today from Brad Guigar on Vimeo.
Based on a presentation I delivered at Chicago Comic Con in August 2013, this is a list of 10 things I think most webcartoonists could do — today — to improve their performance on the Web. This is the first of two parts. The second half features an extended Q&A session.
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I’m a big fan of using the Jetpack plug-in on my WordPress site. It has tons of useful features — not the least of which is their social-media sharing buttons (which we’re going to discuss modifying in a later post).
In the latest update of the plug-in, Jetpack released a new feature – Jetpack Photon.
Photon takes all of your Media Library images and places them on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This decreases your bandwidth usage significantly (especially for people like us who do their major trade in images). Instead of images being delivered from your server, they’re mirrored on the CDN and delivered from there.
I can’t suggest this strongly enough. Between the savings on bandwidth and the speeding-up of your site, it’s a huge benefit!
As much as I like the social media buttons that came installed with Comic Easel, I didn’t like that they were pointing to my social-media places on the Web.
It’s perfectly good to know that I have a Twitter feed (and to link to that feed). But that’s not what social media is about. Social media is about sharing content. And I have to make sure my readers can share my content (within reason).
So I approached Philip Hofer for a solution, and he came up with the following. You’ll first need to download the Jetpack plug-in.
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This piece was kindly contributed by Joseph Stillwell of theHiveworks.com.
The goal of marketing something is either brand recognition or conversion (like selling an item). Most webcomics will fall into brand marketing. Other things that run off subscriptions or items will run off conversion marketing.
First, you have to be realistic about your budget. Marketing can be cheap (handing out pamphlets at a college) or it can get very expensive (like the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to run a U.S. presidential campaign). For most people running webcomics, budgets fall between $1 and $3,000 — pretty small.
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We’ve covered a lot of topics in the recent Hot Seat critiques, but there’s one I’ve been wanting to experiment with for a while now. I think It’s gonna lead to some very interesting discussions.
It’s the Social Media Hot Seat.
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This incredibly helpful guide was passed along to me, and I think it’s worth sharing here.
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