Shamus Writes » Design

Webcomic Site Designs

Jim — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:24:58 +0000

I’ve been perusing the archives for a variety of webcomics in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve seen a wide range of site designs for these comics ranging from abysmal to superb. There are two things I’ve come across that annoy the bejeebers out of me:

‘About’ pages that don’t actually tell you anything about either the comic or the artist. One of the things mentioned in How to Write Webcomics is that a webcomic site should have an ‘About’ page that should tell you a little something about the artist behind the work and possibly even a little something about the comic (like its inspiration, evolution, etc.). In two or three separate instances, I’ve clicked on the ‘About’ page for a comic I enjoyed in order to find out a little more about the philosophy behind the comic and in order to learn a little something about the artist, only to find one or two sentences that contain no useful information other than an email address. There’s one I’m reading right now that’s a little bit bent and contains an off-kilter brand of humor that I find rather enjoyable. The thing about it, though, is that I think it would be even more enjoyable if the artist would set the whole comic into some sort of personal context. I can interpret the comics he writes from my own point of view, but I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s going to be different from the artist’s POV, and there are certain of his comics that simply go right over my head because I don’t understand his POV. A more complete and comprehensive ‘About’ page would go a long way to remedying this situation.
Useful archive links in prominent locations on the page. One thing that I hate is reading a the current comic in a webcomic, enjoying it enough to want to peruse the archives from the first one through to the present one, only to find that a) there are no archive links, or b) I have to click into the archives in order to get to the first comic, or c) there is simply no way, even by going into the archives, to get to the first comic. Any good webcomic should four links placed prominently on the front page either directly above or below (or both) the current comic – first, previous, next, last. New readers, such as myself, find those eminently useful in catching up on what’s gone on in the past, and without those links, we are more likely to surf away and never come back. Even having to click into the archives first before being able to click through to the first comic is frustrating. The more clicks you require your readers to go through in order to dig into your comics increases the chances that your readers are going to get frustrated by the experience and leave without ever becoming fans.

I’d say that about half of the site designs I’ve seen for various webcomics are extremely well-done. About half of the remaining comics could use a little tweaking and smoothing out of trouble areas, and the remaining quarter would greatly benefit from a ground-up redesign to make them more reader-friendly. Webcomics should be fun and easy to navigate, and good design is the way to make that happen.

Blog Content Accessibility

Jim — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 23:23:06 +0000

I have something against blogs that make it difficult to read them remotely. I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. They’re the things that allow busy folks to keep track of the latest and greatest happenings on the Web with much greater ease. So there are a couple of things that kind of bug me:

Blogs that don’t have RSS or that have them but put them in difficult-to-locate spots. There are some blogs (like those found on MySpace, for instance) – not a lot of them – that simply don’t publish RSS feeds. I make it a habit to avoid these like the plague, no matter how quality the content is on these blogs. It’s just a bit too difficult and time-consuming to visit these on a regular basis to see if there are updates. There are others, though, that publish RSS feeds but place them in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to subscribe to them. Windows Live, for example, puts the feeds for their blogs in a place where browsers like Firefox can’t even auto-detect them. I guess that it shouldn’t be any real surprise that Microsoft makes you jump through unnecessary hoops in order to use their particular brand of blog service.
People that use the tag on almost every entry. There are some people who propose that publishing the full content of your blog entries to your feed will reduce the amount of traffic to your blog. They suggest that the best way to get people to come to your blog is to give them a taste and then finish luring them in with the promise of more. I’m not one of those people. In my opinion, excerpting every single entry to your feed is only a little better than having no feed at all because it still forces readers to click through in order to finish reading. I usually avoid blogs that only put excerpts in their feeds (there is one notable exception on my blogroll) for this very reason. I use the tag sparingly, usually just to hide spoiler information from those that don’t want to see it. Maybe using excerpts really does work well for most people. Personally, I prefer to post full content and write what I hope are quality entries that will encourage people to come to my site to comment.
Of course, these are just my personal opinions on these two items. As the saying goes, your own mileage on these may vary a bit on these, and I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences in these areas. That is, after all, what comments are all about.

BlueSands Numbers

Jim — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:14:56 +0000

I’ve got to say that my site’s stats from yesterday alone make my numbers from the rest of the month look paltry by comparison – nearly 1000 hits yesterday, mostly directed at my BlueSands WordPress theme. The next closest day this month is around 140 hits. Quite the margin of difference. Of course, it helps that I also made sure to add BlueSands to the Weblog Tools Collection write-up for yesterday, which always sees a lot of traffic.

It’s also a little more than twice the number of hits my site received when I released the Navigation theme for bbPress, which isn’t all that surprising, considering that WordPress is still, at this moment, more popular than bbPress.

BlueSands

Jim — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 03:40:09 +0000

I’ve been working pretty steadily over the last several days to complete the theme that now adorns this blog. At this point, I’d say it’s about 90% complete. The 10% that remains involves a whole lot of tweaking and validating code before it’s ready for public release. I’m pretty excited about it. This is only my second WordPress theme, and it’s a far cry better than my first, if I do say so myself. I’ve been wanting to build a custom theme for awhile now, but I hadn’t really had the time until I started having all this back trouble – and even then it’s only been since two weeks after my surgery that I’ve even felt up spending this much time working on the code. As soon as I finish tweaking everything, I slap this sucker down on its own download page and post a formal release announcement.

I’m also planning to redo my bbPress theme to match, thus giving the two primary parts of my site a more cohesive look and feel. I suspect that one will also be a fair bit of work, though it will probably be much less work than creating my first bbPress theme, since I build this WordPress theme using the same colors with the end goal of creating the bbPress theme. Once I’m done with that, I’ll update the download page so that folks can have their option to download the WordPress theme, the bbPress theme, or both themes bundled together.

Also, with WordPress 2.3 coming out at some point later this year, I’ll update this theme to accommodate for tags being native and Ultimate Tag Warrior going the way of the dodo. That, however, should be a very easy tweak.

Learning PHP

Jim — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:50:26 +0000

I’m sandboxing PHP today (not to be confused with playing with the Sandbox theme from the fine folks over at plaintxt.org), working on learning the code so that I can start coding the stuff from scratch, instead of just being able to hack other people’s work. I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile now, and well, I have quite a bit of free time on my hands these days, so this seems like as good a time as any to learn a new skill. I’ve got the PHP tutorial up in a tab, and I’m working through it step by step.

I’ve got at least a couple of plugins I’d like to write for WordPress, things that I haven’t seen anyone else put together yet. Trouble is, I don’t know enough yet to write these plugins myself. I plan to change that. And heck, maybe I’ll even be able to add my own weight to some of the WordPress development somewhere down the road.

Anyway, time’s a-wasting. Back to the tutorial. So far, I’m finding PHP coding to be pretty straightforward. But then again, I learned C Programming several years back. This really isn’t all that much different. It’s fun!

Bit by the Coding Bug

Jim — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:27:03 +0000

I’m getting my inner geek on – again. I spent the majority of my day today trying to figure out how to crosspost from WordPress to MySpace. I’d found a hack that looked like it had potential that I messed with for quite a while, but so far I’ve had no success in getting it to run, despite having following the directions to the letter and checked everything over fifthlicate (and then some). I’m still waiting for a reply back on my comment to see if the hack’s author has any idea what’s blocking my attempts.

Ultimately, I gave up on that and started trying to find a way to put a light-weight Twitter badge on to my MySpace profile. I don’t like any of the badges that Twitter produces, so I looked around for other options. But of course, MySpace being the notoriously unfriendly environment that it is, there are no good solutions that are both functional and attractive on the page. So, I’ve given up on that option for the time being, as well.

In the meantime, I plan to learn a little more about the ins-and-outs of PHP coding tomorrow. I’ve got the MyDashboard plugin installed on this blog, but it doesn’t display quite as much information in the dashboard from some of my other behind-the-scenes plugins as I’m used to. So, my intent is to learn out to create a few gadgets that will tap into these plugins and put this information closer to my fingertips. If all goes well, I may even plan to create gadgets for a few other things that I’ve always wanted on the dashboard and never been able to find plugins for.

On that note, I’ve got a few of the plugin pages from the WordPress codex up in my browser. I really would like to get more involved with the development end of WordPress, but it is my sketchy knowledge of PHP that limits how much I can do. Since I have at least a two or three more weeks of down-time while I heal up from surgery, I hope to make some use of that time to learn a little more about how to write plugins for WordPress. I’ve come up with ideas in the past for things I’d love my WordPress installation to be able to do, things that, thus far, no one else has created plugins for. So, I hope to learn and add a few things to the WordPress community myself.

I’ve got other things to work on, as well. I still have plans to create a customized WordPress theme. I’d started work on a minimal theme last week, but that’s been on hiatus due to surgery last week. But now that I’m beginning to feel better and gain some more mobility again, I hope to get back to this project, as well, and try to finish it up. The skeleton I’d managed to build last week will probably undergo an overhaul, though, as I’ve changed my mind about some things in my mind about where I want to go with it. Heck, if I get really ambitious, I might even tailor a new bbPress theme to go with it.

Resetting HTML

Jim — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:45:50 +0000

I’ve recently discovered the wonderfully marked-up Sandbox theme for WordPress and, in so doing, discovered the inspiration to build another theme for myself. But I also discovered rather quickly that there were a few minor problems with things not spreading out to the furthest edges of the browser. So I sought help and found that I needed to reset the margins for the html and body tags. I was also directed to this fabulous CSS entry called Reset Reloaded, which provides global resets for just about everything in a basic web page. I applied these and discovered the beauty of a WordPress theme with absolutely no formatting whatsoever. It’s a wonderful thing.

From there I’ve begun restructuring every element to my satisfaction, building what I need and want. And with Sandbox, this is made all the easier because everything has an id or a class (or multiple classes). All I have to do is look at the page source and see what tags are generated by the built-in code and then build the stylesheet accordingly. I’m working on a single-column, minimalistic theme with very few (if any) frills or flourishes. At this point, I’m thinking that most of the traditional sidebar content will also be shifted to a custom-built page template, but that one I’m going to have to work on a bit and see what comes of it. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll likely finish it up sometime later this week, due to the fact that there will be a brief pause in all coding work while I read the final installment of Harry Potter tomorrow.

If you’re a web coder, do check out Eric Meyer’s “Reset Reloaded.” I think you’ll like what you see and how much it cleans things up for you from the outset.

Theming

Jim — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:30:40 +0000

One of the advantages of being flat on one’s back is I’ve had time to do a little WordPress theme design the last couple of days. I volunteered to host and build a new website for my parents’ church – the one they had before was, quite frankly, a ghastly design and layout and difficult to update and maintain. So, I moved their site to a WordPress installation on my server, and then set about modifying the Sandbox theme to my liking. I started out with something very plain and basic – no frills, just the basic elements in place – and ended up with something a bit nicer looking.

I don’t know if I’ll release this theme publicly or not. I’d have to clean up a couple of the files a bit, since I added some custom coding to make a couple of the plugins work correctly. But it might be worth it.

See-Through MySpace

Jim — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:47:58 +0000

I’ve done it again, much to my chagrin. I’ve set up another MySpace account. I wouldn’t have done it, but frankly, right now it’s the only way for me to re-establish some semblance of contact with a few of my high school classmates. Oh, the things I do for my friends…

In the process, though, I’ve discovered yet another terrible layout idea – opacity. Specifically, making just about everything on the page opaque just so that the background design can be seen. It’s obvious that those who employ this particular technique know nothing about web page design. Opacity can be a good technique – when used in moderation. Making an entire page opaque, however, is a very bad idea because it makes everything super-difficult to read. And I’m not one of those ultra-patient folks who will labor through it just to find out what’s new.

Oy, MySpace is still evil. But in this case, I have good reason to live with it – at least for the time being.

One Column or Two?

Jim — Sat, 05 May 2007 03:18:44 +0000

Excuse me for a moment while I toss out a little mini-rant…

I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a nice single-column theme to use on my blog. I’ve got Daydream, which I’m using now and that I like quite a lot, but I’m always interested in finding some new ones, as well. Here’s the problem I keep running into, though:

I wonder if WordPress theme designers actually know what a “one-column” theme actually is. You see, I’ve found two themes in the last week that were described as being single-column themes, yet when you navigate to the download page and look at the theme’s screenshot, there it is! Two columns! There’s a main column for the content and a second column for the sidebar. It’s also fruitless to search the official WordPress themes directory for exactly the same reason – half the themes listed in the one-column area are actually multiple columns. For once, I wish WordPress theme designers would learn their numbers.

And I still wish there were more crisp, clean one-column themes out there.

Blog Design Issues

Jim — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:54:11 +0000

Attention, all bloggers! I must take task with a handful of design issues in many of the templates you use. So please take a look at the following issues and see if any exist on your blogs. If so, please correct them immediately.

Header Links – I’ve noticed that quite a few people neglect to include links back to their main page in their site headers. Ideally, readers should be able to click on the site header at any time and be returned back to the main page. Sadly, this is often not the case. It’s not that big of a deal when readers arrive at your blog by way of the main page. They can click down to an individual entry to read or leave comments then simply click ‘Back’ in their browser to return to the main page. But what about those folks who arrive at your blog by way of individual entries? They read, they leave a comment, then they want to browse the rest of your site. In the absence of a header link, the only way to get back to the main page is by modifying your site’s URL and truncating down to just the main address. It’s inconvenient, to say the least. Correcting this problem is easy enough – simply modify your header.php file and encapsulate your site’s title in a link tag. An additional option (notice I did not say alternative) is to add a small navigation bar into your sidebar that includes a ‘Home’ link to your front page. This makes it very easy for readers to get back to the front page at any time in their browsing experience, making their stay on your site much more enjoyable.
Sidebar Content – I’ve been to some sites where the sidebar is longer than the front page of the blog itself due to the vast amounts of clutter. In my opinion, a good rule of thumb to follow is this – keep sidebar content to a minimum. I realize that many folks have become emotionally attached to the use of chiclets and graphics, but the fact of the matter is that most sidebar graphics are not necessary and even detract from the overall look and functionality of your blog. I’ve been to some sites where I actually had trouble finding the navigational links because they were so buried inside graphics and images. Lose the chiclets, folks; if necessary, create a separate page just for them and use that page to advertise all your favorite sites. Ideally, the only things that should be in your sidebars are your site navigation links, archives, searchbar, and categories, blogroll (with a limit being placed on the number of these, as well; some folks seem to think that half a dozen blogrolls aren’t even quite enough), metadata, a link to your RSS feed (if you have one), and maybe room for one or two small flourishes (I have two sideblog categories I use for one-line entries). Essentially, your sidebar content should be reserved for those things that will help your readers find their way around your site more effectively. Everything else should be put into blog entries or separate pages. Tidy things up a little bit, and make your blog easier on the eyes (and the nerves).
Old Comments – Some people like to turn off comments on entries that are older than a certain number of days. The reason they do this is because comment spammers like to target those entries with Internet graffiti. But for legitimate readers who stumble across those entries and want to add to discussion by leaving a comment, it’s very frustrating when they can’t. Most blogging platforms nowadays have some pretty good methods of blocking comment spam while still leaving all entries open for public discussion. Akismet has plugins for a wide variety of blogging platforms as well as a couple of discussion forums and photo galleries. Blogger uses image verification (a less than ideal remedy that nonetheless does the job). Whatever platform you use, I suggest you take the time to research an effective solution for comment spam and turn those comments back on. Your readers will thank you.
Next/Previous – It’s a standard practice for new readers to a blog to read down through all the entries on the front page before proceeding to the second. Imagine how annoying it is when they get to the bottom of the page only to find that the ‘Next’ link is missing for the second page. For most blog owners who do this, they reason that readers can simply click through to their archives by using the links in their sidebar. That’s one solution, but it’s not very practical. It involves readers having to scroll back up to the top of the page, since the last entry on the page tends to be located a fair distance below the archives links. It is much simpler and less hassle to let readers simply click on ‘Next’ to continue reading. Most visitors to your blog probably won’t ever read anything older on such sites, no matter how interesting the content is to them.

Ultimately, the point of having a well-designed template is to dress your writing up a little bit and, more importantly, make it as easy as possible for your readers to gain access to all your writings.

So, go take another look at your template. If it has any of the issues mentioned above, consider fixing them or switching to a template that has a more solid design.

MySpace is Evil

Jim — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:12:34 +0000

I’ve been rebelling against the MySpace craze for quite some time now. I don’t like the site for a variety of reasons, but recently, I went ahead and set up a profile for myself.¹ Enough people that I know have their own profiles that I was curious to at least test-drive the service for myself and see what it was all about. And I’m afraid that my worst suspicions were confirmed.

MySpace is, indeed, evil.

There are a number of reasons why I say this. For one thing, customizing site profiles breaks just about every rule for good web page design that there is. The way the site is set up, for instance, margins break all the time. I use a 1024×768 screen resolution on my monitor, and far too often I am forced to sidescroll twice that width in order to view the entire page. This is usually due to the annoying practice that many MySpacers have of pasting images that have no business appearing on a computer screen into the comments. Someone left one such comment on my own profile, and I summarily deleted it. It would be better to completely disallow images in the comments, but I do not see such a thing occurring anytime in the near future.

Apparently, few people have ever been told that it is really bad form to load onto their web pages audio or video files that start automatically. It is not uncommon to surf to a MySpace profile where at least one audio file is playing, and sometimes there are two or three playing on top of each other. Two words – cacophony. Links to files are good; embedded files are bad.

MySpace also gives non-registered users the sense that there is more happening behind the scenes. I was disappointed to find that this is not really the case. Yes, there are image and video galleries that are only accessible to registered users. There is also a pseudo-mail system at work and bulletin boards, but aside from that, there really isn’t a whole lot happening on the backend. What you see on the front page is pretty much all there is. Again, two words – blasÃƒÂ©.

My end conclusion is that MySpace is a lot of fluff and nonsense with no real substance. It’s a social profiling site, and in my opinion, that’s a waste of both time and effort. If I really wanted to get to know someone, I would do it in real life, not through a shoddy, poorly designed web page system. Take part in a discussion forum, chat over Xbox Live, meet people in real life, but by all means, whatever you do, avoid MySpace. There are better ways to socialize over the Internet than via this site.²

A well-designed MySpace profile can be a good thing and can be very useful if you want to promote something, like a new novel or a band you’re in, etc., but such profiles are a scarcity. The amount of junk and the number of broken profiles that proliferate the system far outweigh any advantages MySpace holds. As such, it’s best left alone.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and the whole thing will cave in on itself. We can hope.

And no, I’m not providing a link; it’s probably not going to be active much longer, anyway.
By the way, I hold the same opinion about similar sites, like Facebook, etc.