Well, this took far longer than I anticipated, in part because I've been fortunate enough to be busy with other work and also because transferring the site was the opposite of fun and I dragged my feet the whole time.
You may have noticed that the old site had terrible load times, this is because when I started this project I had no idea what I was doing. Doing research and making comics: not a problem, creating a functioning website that did what I wanted: all the problems. I am not a coder so I built the site through a drag and drop software, but my images were too large, and the soft-wear I was using quickly became obsolete after the site launched. I Ignored this until it became embarrassingly apparent that the site was just too bulky.
So for the past year... I've been slowly recreating the site in a better more current website builder.
I still can't say the site is perfect, (especially if you are on a phone) but it's at least a thousand times better.
Notable Changes!
- Added icons to indicate whether you can tap or click on an image
- Added pop-up information panels, for things that need clarification there are now info icons that you can click/tap to bring up and extra information.
- Added Bonus Comic Popups, similar to the information icons, but more narrative. When telling these stories inevitably things have to get edited out, sometimes the things that are cut are really interesting but don't fit with the flow of the narrative. These bonus comics are for those moments.
-Shrunk literally every image so the site loads faster.
-Got rid of many of the uninteresting rollovers, (note on this at the bottom).
- Two domains, sadly the comic has to be on a fixed-width website, otherwise, the art gets moved all-around out of order. (the comic is set up untraditionally and is often just a bunch of images and text sporadically placed text boxes. Making it fluid width means that on small screens all the images get stacked top to bottom, completely changing the layout of the art and text, this wouldn't be so terrible except that it often moves things completely out of order, and just genuinely makes the site an incomprehensible mess. Strangely I can't mix and match to make some pages fixed width and other pages fluid. So I opted to at least have some things optimized for mobile by giving the comic its own domain, and everything else another.
-The addition of a long-desired blog. Yes, this is what you're reading right now, I always wanted a blog section for updates, small comics/art not included on the main comic, and whatever else.
-Closed the Patreon and started a Ko-fi. For the people who supported me on Patreon, I can't thank you enough, but it was too stressful trying to keep up with it and make exclusive content. So I opted for something more like a tip jar.
- on that last note I added an official nest page. Anyone who has ever helped or donated to the site will be added to the nest as a token of my appreciation.
Lastly a note on losing the rollovers:
Losing (most) of the rollovers was a tough call, but I think it's for the best. Nearly every image on the original site had a rollover and since most people read these things on mobile, in order to see the rollovers you would have to tap around. Which is not something people normally do when they are reading. Plus double-tapping quickly on a phone can cause the screen to zoom in, which is annoying and dissuades from tapping. So I decided to lean towards making more gifs, and marking the images which you can tap.
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