Test Driving the FREE WCN Account
Last week Joey Manley announced that Webcomics Nation would be offering free accounts, so I dutifully went over to sign up for my account to research this article. (Oh yeah- I also wanted to get in on the action!)
I've been growing more and more dissatisfied with Comic Genesis. I'm not a programmer and I've found the Keentags difficult to incorporate into my pages. Manley has solved this problem for me with his promise to make WCN the Blogger of webcomics. I find it so much easier to upload and edit each installment using WCN and Manley has lived up to his promise, because it does remind me a lot of Blogger. You upload your image and you can even over-ride the background color with this little nifty color picker. (You can also plug in the six number code if you know it, but like I said, I'm not a programmer and I hate figuring that stuff out.)
A few downsides is that you can't put more than one image up on your installment unless you host the images elsewhere and write the HTML code in at the bottom of the upload form. At Comic Genesis I was getting in the habit of making large pages and saving them in slices. I would title them 20061115a, 20061115b, etc and they'd just line up on the page and my upload times were a little faster that way. You also can't upload more than one comic at a time. If you're just starting your comic, this may not be a problem, but transferring the archives of a strip with a longer run can get time consuming. I spent an hour this morning transferring one Chapter over and I still have more work to do.
On Comic Genesis you never were quite sure what your comic would look like on each update until it went live. I don't know how many Friday mornings I woke up and looked at the new comic I had put up earlier in the week and was disappointed that I had screwed something up. WCN, once again taking a cue from Blogger, has a preview page after each installment form has been filled out and I've caught a few mistakes before publishing them.
OK. So you've put your comic up and now you want to look at it. Free accounts have advertising. How else do you think you could get this for FREE? But they really are non-obtrusive. I haven't seen any annoying animations and the ads are for comic related stuff. My family is interested in my work and I was a little uneasy sending a link to my Grandparents knowing that there might be an ad for Adult Friend Finder above my story about three little kids.
Supposedly on Comic Genesis if you give yourself a G-rating you can avoid getting more adult ads. I gave my comic a G-rating and still got some adult advertising. Eventually, I'd like the strip to mature as the characters grow up, but I don't necessarily want the ads to mature with it. I like the option of having an adult themed strip done tastefully and artistically without having to have ads for porn on the site just because of the rating.Let's talk about navigation. WCN has the option of navigation buttons, but the read can also simply click on the comic to advance to the next page. I like this feature a lot. It's simple, intuitive and it saves you the hassle of trying to incorporate the navigational images into your site design or page layout.
One of the best features of WCN is the fact that you can have several different comics in one account. That's one link to send to all your friends and potential clients for all your work. You can have two comic series under one umbrella site and also you can do one-shots and mini series this way. I definitely have some stories that I've been brewing, but was hesitant to break into anything in the comics that I have established currently to spotlight a story that my have nothing to do with my weekly comic. Yet I wanted to put them up somewhere. So where should I put them? WCN answers that question. Make a one-shot! I now have both My Life in Records and Graphic Poems under one account and it makes my life so much easier, plus people are more likely to cross-over since its more obvious on the site that I am involved with both comics.Finally, Joey is professional in the way he conducts himself. I emailed him with a question before realizing there were help forums (whoops) and he got right back to me and was very cordial and polite. I also see that he is on the help forums quite a bit answering the questions personally. I'm not sure if he'll be able to keep up this personal touch as the site grows, but I appreciate it for now.
Ultimately the pros out-weigh the
cons and I'm glad I made the switch. I
may have to re-think how large my images will be but that's OK. I highly recommend this new service to
webcomic creators out there.
Now back to switching over my archives.
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