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Website First Impression, Judged In the Blink of An Eye

Submitted by Tyler Martin on January 13, 2006 - 17:13

I thought this was a good article to read. You have one chance at a first impression. I think a lot of webcomic creators could benefit from working on their website design. It's always a shame to see a great comic have bad presentation. I think in this modern day of website and media overload we judge or sample stuff in an instant. With all the spam and crap around our highly exercised internal filters are quick to cast stuff aside.

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Website Design IS Important

Xaviar Xerexes's picture

by Xaviar Xerexes - 11/28/2006 - 10:57

Webcomics should live and die on the quality of... the comic of course. But it wouldn't hurt a lot of people to pay a little more attention to their actual website designs.

If nothing else remember to keep it simple and do no harm when designing your website...

____

Xaviar Xerexes

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Gnaw.

I run this place! Tip the piano player on the way out.

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by Fenris - 01/13/2006 - 19:19

While I agree that a good website design can help in making your comic look more professional, we have the benefit of being judged on the merit of our actual work rather than just layout. Simple designs can work, though some people will read comics on horrendous websites and still enjoy them.

All that being said, this is not an excuse to let your site look like crap.

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Quote: we have the benefit

by rezo - 01/13/2006 - 19:57

Quote:
we have the benefit of being judged on the merit of our actual work rather than just layout.
Only after, of course, people give the layout an ok. The majority of people that decide not to read a comic after visiting a site make that decision from the very first few pages pages they see, right? For examples sake, I created an introduction page for my 168 hour comic from last summer - just as a quick explanation of what it was and why I did it. About half of the people that look at the introduction page go on to read the comic. About 35% of the people that start to read the comic finish it. I make that page more appealing and more people would go on to read the comic. The same goes for the "children's book" I made in November. A more interesting page design might get some of those people that backed off more interested in sticking around a little longer. In any case,though its obviously not definitive of what kind of reaction your site will get, it's certainly a good move to make the more superficial aspects of running a webcomic as strong as possible so that more people will give the actual content a chance.

<a xhref="http://www.kiwisbybeat.com" target=blank>Kiwis by beat!</a>

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