Skypunks 1

by Daniel on December 13, 2010 at 2:00 am

Uh oh, there’s some troubled monsters flying out over there.

- Trolla hobo

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Well, I’ve been working out this website redesign a bit more this weekend. I’ve got the footer more in shape, and generally things are in better shape then they’ve been in for a while.

The comic navigation (just under the comic) seems to be working again, and I’m in the midst of trying to put a BACK and NEXT arrow on each side of the comic.

There is more cleanup to do, and there’s bound to be some problems for some of you. (Though I hope not.)

Feel free to report your issues here in the comments if you have any problems.

HOWEVER, please clear your browser cache. (Usually under “Preferences” or “Tools”). I was having some really janky stuff happen until I got that cache cleared.

It was a 50/50 old site/new site; bad.

New Features

There’s not a lot of new features, but we’ll keep working on that as we go. This redesign was mostly focused on cleaning up the design of the site.

  • Click the Monster Commute logo to go home.
  • Twitter feed on the left column.
  • New “World” section with some articles.
  • New Datafile in the footer. (Bottom right corner.)
  • New banner ads (I knew that you’d be excited.)

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Why redesign the site?

Well, the comic has changed a lot since launch, and I wanted to better incorporate the feel of the world into the site. Now, if you look at the site, you get more of a sense of what the comic and world are all about.

ALSO, I want this site to become a WORLD site for Monstru… it is a comic… but also a world that you can learn more about, if you’re into it.

This is somewhat in preparation for the Monster Commute RPG, and somewhat because it just makes sense. It’s a tough thing to figure out how to display a whole world in a website, but I’m always looking for ways to do so. Know that this is simply the beginning.

The Datafile in the footer will eventually link to all kinds of different World things that you can find on the site. For now, it’s basic until I can get more caught up.

I see that there are more banners now. Is this all about money?

Nah, not really.

If it was all about money, we probably would only made about 35 comics before we quit. :)

However, we needed to improve some ways that we advertise/monetize the site. Now the ads are a bit more tucked in, and we have a nice large leaderboard across the top. Overall though, the comic shows up a bit higher above the fold, which is good.

In the footer we’re able to feature some of our own products a bit more fancily, too. I’ve only just gotten this to work, so later we’ll have more. This is good because your purchases actually drive much more revenue than advertising does. (But advertising may win eventually.)

Endplate

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the design of the site. I learned more about CSS (dear gawd) and it was nice to build a site from the perspective of a Furnace goblin.

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