I finally got a sequence of twenty pages inked-colored-scripted. I've read it over and over and think "Hey, that's a workable story, worthy of its own little website." So, I went to Copyright offices online registration site and, one hour and $35 later, filed an application to copyright my story and its main characters.
Then I got online to shop for websites and...Wordpress looked good. I was particularly attracted by the wide range of comics that are publishing(Dr McNinja, Squid Row...) with Wordpress, and the repeated phases "simple to use" and "hard to screw up."
I girded myself for hardship, told my fan base (Wife and sons, I love you guys!) that it could take as long as a week to have a working website. Four days later...it looks like it will take way more time and outside intervention to build the website abalonofcalifornia.com .
As of this writing Wordpress and Comicpress are pretty seamlessly integrated, so seamlessly in fact that it took a while to believe that I had them both. Paying for the site was pretty painless: $1.89/month for a minimum of 24months, but the smooth process at Wordpress $checkout quickly convinced me that more security and functionality was highly recommended; still I managed to "get out the door" for about $68. Nice.
I have been using Web comic sites as a reader for years, so I had a pretty good idea what features I wanted in a site. But I had no experience in site design, not even the minuscule amount needed to understand the Wordpress directions. Edit buttons were in weird places or, in the case of Media edit, the button was hidden until you passed the mouse across it; WTH! There is no instruction about the requisite size for media posts, none! So I wasted half a day repeatedly posting comic pages that were the wrong size, and couldn't be edited once I got them posted. There are several tutorial websites for comic press online, but the most of the advice is dated(ie over two years old) or presumes you know enough to "make a few changes in code" and can thereby easily fix your problems.
Wordpress lays out some ready made applications as plugins and, to their credit, the plugins are so simple to upload that even I can do it without trashing the functionality of the rest of my site. However, as I have demonstrated, the site building instructions are somewhat incomplete and not idiot proof.
I'll take any advice on dealing with Wordpress/Comicpress, or what you consider to be vital parts of a good comic website. Give me a shout out.
Comments
Thanks Sven.
Re:Saints. The actions and interests of the saints were an integral part of this era; and in the area of California I live in they very much still are part of everyday life. An added plus of Abalon's commitments to the saints in the beginning of this story is they will become a problem that Abalon has to work out as the story progresses. No matter how good hearted a 'Sainted religion' is, believing in a layer that exists between us and Christ is very problematic indeed.
Thank you for the help guys. www.abalonofcalifornia.com is now up and running; PTL! Please give it a look over and let me know how it works.
I'm not familiar with the ComicPress template, so my answers may not fit exactly...
1) That is a mystery to me. I think you are right that it is a part of the ComicPress template. Probably it is a "feature". :)
2) "View attachment" will only show you the file and not the full post. Click "Preview" to see what the post will look like before you publish it.
3) How comfortable do you feel with hand coding? If you will switch from the View tab to the Text tab in your post text editor, you can see the actual listed dimensions of the image and can adjust them manually until you find what you like?
4) Is each page of the comic added as a Page or a Post? If they are Pages, you can check your Page Attributes section on the left of each page and see what template it is using. If it is set on the Default Template, each Page will bring the special features with it. You can change it to another template to get rid of those. If you brought each comic page in as a Post, that fix is trickier. Try a Google search for "wordpress exclude sidebar from posts" to find the code you need.
Terrific; Thank you Bros! I have no coding experience so all the functionality so far has been achieved through ComicPress/WordPress plugins.
You can see what's been achieved so far by going to www.abalonofcalifornia.com .
1) You'll notice that when you pull up a post, you get a double image. I suspect this is the fault of the Comicpress template but I have no idea how to eliminate it.
2) The "view attachment" preview looks nothing like the final post; why not.
3) I'm uploading images at the size of 8.5 x 11 inches but then must reduce it by 80% to fit it on the post. Neither program or template states any requirement for the upload size all though a full size image is supposed to be 1700 x 2330 pixels. I would like to make the images as large as possible but...how (?)
4)I could make more room for images on the post pages if my special features were only on the homepage. How do I do that? Sven has some good suggestions for features, but I don't know how to get them on my home page.
Thanks in advance for your time.
I use Wordpress on a regular basis and can help you with pretty much anything on the coding end. What are your specific questions?
I personally hate Wordpress and Comicpress, but I get both enough to assist you if you should need it.
I think you should have a shop section, links, an about page, a means for social media sharing, and a comments section. If you have a shop section, you can sell t-shirts and books related to your work, and get paid. If you have links to other comics, and your users use those links, then the other comic sites will likely link you as well (because of their analytics), thus increasing your traffic. An about page introduces new users to the comic. Social media sharing increases your traffic too. Having a comments section helps individuals interact with what is going on, which is helpful as well.
:-/