The Internet sure has changed since 2003, when I managed my own online comic, Dragon's Pride. Yesterday I was in the process of updating and promoting WritersNewsWeekly.com when my mind started to wonder. If I were going to design and operate a new online comic website today, how would I do it? How would I use the latest Internet practices, widgets and websites? How would my new site differ from my old site?
Well to start I would register a domain name. DP never had it's own domain. When I took the site from a free server to a paid one I didn't pay the extra fee to register. At the time it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't up on the best SEO or linking practices. Paying to host my portfolio was one thing, but I couldn't justify spending the extra money on something that was, at the time, just a hobby.
Of course I'd design a website based on my comic art using Photoshop, which is what I've done in the past. However, this time around there would be no massive image map with links to all of my pages. These days I'm experimenting with CSS and I recognize the importance of physical keywords.
Would I keep my site map the same? Back in the day I had an index page that linked to a table of contents page that would link to all of my individual html documents. One hand coded link for each individual comic page. Today I would probably look into using a content management system with tags for updates and have my newest comic display on the front page, like many other online comics do these days. It's convenient for readers and good SEO.
In 2003 I spread the word about my comic by looking up other comics, link exchanging with them, posting links on their forums, doing gift art, joining sites like onlinecomics.net, deviantart.com and the like. Today I would certainly seek out link exchanges, but there are new promotional tools available in social networking sites like facebook and myspace. I'd use twitter.com to share content updates and digg.com to spread the word. There are so many new ways to generate feedback and site traffic, I won't even try to list them all.
As the Internet grows and changes shape, I look forward to finding new ways to use it. I may not be up on all of the latest practices but I sure have learned a lot since 2003.
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