Comic Genesis Forums

Here's a glimpse of what i hope me and my friend's comic will look like...
Three Guys and Shane
Any comments?
-----Edit-----
Of course there is a lot of work to be done, this is just a template for it really...

The drawing style could work, but be careful with the frames. People hate to scroll horizontally to see the comic.

Now put an actual comic up, dammit.

Design wise- it's rather spartan, not that that's a bad thing. It'd look a lot better if it wasn't in Times New Roman, though.

I'm not sure the green and white theme works though... there's too little of the green and it seems imbalanced. Try having the frames green, that might look better.

My biggest beef is this though:

315813 bytes, that being, 308 kb for a greyscale image that size?!

Compress your images! For something of that size and non-colour to boot, the size shouldn't be more than 100kb.

A rule of thumb is to keep it simple. We're here to read comics, and we only care about site design if it impendes navigation or if it detracts from the comic. Make more comics, put them up and worry about site design later.

just changing to jpeg made it a much more managable 84k. Even if it is lossy.

-edited twice...

Ya thanks for the imput...I hope to have a comic up soon...i'm not the artist...soo...ya...

I will say it because everyone else is too polite.

Frames are evil. Don't use them.
Frames and Keenspace don't mix. Don't use them.
Frames make my browser sad. Don't use them.

Also, Keenspace requires an ad at the top of every page that gets loaded. You should take that into account when you design your pages. The ad banner is 468x60 every time.

1. The ad banner must be viewable on the page without scrolling no matter what resolution the browser is in.

2. You may not link directly to pictures. (example, the comic images or fan art) The picture must be on a page with an ad.

3. If you have a live journal, blogger or something that comes from offsite you can load it in an iframe without an ad. You can do the same for news pages that are onsite (I believe Kisai has said this). These are the only exceptions to the ad rule.

I started with a news page but never updated it so I split it up and added it to the bottom of the comic pages. For some reason, I update the news more often now.

Why don't frames and keenspace mix? Are they hard to set up, or does it just fial altogether?

Ehhh..i guess i should wait till i get a keenspace account, and see what all this index stuff and workspace is all about...and i gotta get reading...lots of reading...

The index stuff isn't too hard. The FAQ on the Help forum covers most stuff.

Actually, that FAQ also has versions of the default index_template.html and daily_template.html. You can actually copy those onto your local machines and start editing them. I did that a little at first. Instead of copying them over to the site, I'd just open them like normal HTML files and see how they looked. The images were missing, but at least I could quickly view my format changes.

Frames don't make Keenspace fail or anything like that. It's just HTML. You can do whatever you like. What people were doing was putting the ad in its own frame so it was always visible on page. Nice sentiment, but that doesn't make Keenspace any money.

Besides, I felt like cackling hideously when I wrote that. Sometimes you just need to let go, you know. . .. 8)

Against all the rants and disencouragments I received, I decided to set up a keenspace comic with frames. My main reason is that I don't want the flash thingy I did for navigation to load at every single page. Of course my comic still have a lot of problems, and some of them will never be solved, like the fact that I can't use the index.htm as the frameset without killing the keen automation. But I think this is just a minor problem.

I already said it before, and I'll say it again: I think people here are too fond to point out what is wrong or right in terms of webdesign. Frames aren't bad themselves, it's the use people make of them.

Faub... I don't get what your talking about the ad...if it's seen on all the pages, wouldn't that be better?

Well, no, you can't really put an ad in 3 frames at once without royally messing up your site design, and besides, nobody who's going to your site for a comic wants to see a big pile of scrolling ads anyway. Especially since there's the off chance Keenspace might start using banners with sound again. THREE banners with sound would drive me nuts, and that alone would probably make me leave your site and never come back, regardless of how good your content is.

Yes, frames CAN work, I've used them before, but they really don't add as much to your site as you might think. If you insist on using them, be sure to edit ALL your external links so their targeted to either "_top" or "new", PLEASE, for the love of all that is good never forget to do this. Otherwise if someone leaves your site, they get stuck with your frame still on the side of the new webpage. It's really annoying, and makes you look dumb.

As for the drawing, I HIGHLY recommend your artist get an editing program of some kind (preferably photoshop or paint shop pro) and learn how to ink and color a little bit before jumping into the comic endeavor. With a little practice, the comic could be top notch, just make sure whoever's writing it (presumably you) knows how to make the funny.

Adjusting my rant of terror over to RPin for a second, having an only-flash navigation bar is probably actually a really bad idea. It might look cool, but if most of the stuff on your site is non-flash, you take the risk of people who don't have a flash player being completely unable to get around your site. Yes, there are still people in this day and age who don't have flash. Even HomestarRunner has an html navigation link system at the bottom of every page, make sure to at least have a backup, but with frames even your backup is going to look bad. If you're worried about bandwidth, don't worry too much, if they're reading the site a lot, the navigation will get cached pretty quickly, and they won't redownload it with every page. Flash files tend to be pretty small anyway (unless your nav bar is an action packed movie).

Woo, I sure talked a lot this time.

Fatty-McPhat wrote:Faub... I don't get what your talking about the ad...if it's seen on all the pages, wouldn't that be better?

Ooh, I just realized what you were asking about this. The ad DOES need to be seen on all pages, but it needs to be a new ad. (Keenspace has more than one advertiser). The pageviews are counted (for financial purposes) by how many times the reader loads up a new ad, so with one static ad in a frame that never changes, someone could hypothetically read thousands of comics, taking up tons of bandwidth, and only register one pageview for keenspace. That is a BAD thing.