New site design

Posted Sunday, January 11, 2009

In late November, I got an email from a high school student named Gabe Boning offering to redesign my site.  I was all for that, so over December he put together the site you see now.

I’m pretty happy with it.  Besides a snazzy new layout, let me tell you about some new stuff the site has:

A news page: You are looking at it right now!
An RSS feed: It has the actual comic and all the normal extra text.  You should subscribe to it!
A new banner ad: I wanted to raise a bit more money so I can pay for hosting the site.

Besides that, Gabe made it way easy for me to update the site.  I can do it in a fraction of the time now.

I’d really like to know what you think of the site.  Conveniently, you can leave comments on news items.

  • Hurray, comments!

    By Mark on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • Nice!

    By Elias on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • Well hey, this sure is cool. I approve wholeheartedly.

    By Daniel Gempesaw on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • i love the colours

    By erin on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • Neat!  You should put a “comics” link in up in the top right with the other links.

    By Matt Fendt on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • It’s true; the colors are so mellow it’s soothing.

    By Austin on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • Awesome sauce!

    By Jason on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • it’s all schmancy and stuff

    i like it

    By Dan Dodge on Saturday, January 10, 2009

  • Nice. The design was a little jarring at first, but it’s an interesting effect, and I think I like it.

    I will say that menuback.png could do with antialiasing.

    By Phil on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Wow, it looks good I have to say. I agree with Matt Fendtt though. A link to the comic from this page would be handy :D

    By Amy on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Well, it does look good, just doesn’t match the webcomic so much

    By JoHn on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • The new site looks great. I hope this helps the comic reach new audiences.

    By Chase on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Thanks, Gabe! I think we all apreciate this!

    By Ross Prajzner on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • yay, there aren’t those weird numbers after the url anymore!

    By Jon on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Beautiful! New URL, hooray!

    Although, I have to say, the comments aren’t very chronological.

    By Ben on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • @Phil: anti-aliased, per request

    @Ben: date ordering for comments is fixed. Screw MySQL.

    By Gabe on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • I think the top add-banner is a bit unsightly. Any chance of moving it to the bottom? I don’t mind if you fill the bottom with adverts.

    By Bob on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Gabe, I love how you are keeping up with this.  I also love that you know what anti-aliasing is.

    As for the ad at the top, I actually liked the way it worked with other ads besides the red scream-y one.  I canceled that ad and made some other changes to the ad box that hopefully make it a little less aesthetically unappealing.

    Here’s my thinking: I don’t really like having ads that people don’t see.  I feel like I’m cheating the system a bit when that happens, because Project Wonderful bidding is mostly traffic dependent, not click rate dependent.  So I wanted to experiment with an ad at the top of the page.

    That being said, the most important thing to me is the comic.  So if the ads are seriously getting in the way of your comic reading experience, I’ll move them or get rid of them.

    Also, the RSS feed, as of right now, is ad free.  It’ll probably stay that way because I don’t really like the idea of the ads loading up if you have the comic on your homepage or something.

    By Sanjay on Sunday, January 11, 2009

  • Site’s pretty, but one little annoyance is that the title at the top isn’t a real hyperlink but requires JavaScript (for no good reason that I can see), which means that those of us who surf with scripting turned off can’t click on it… yet the “it’s a hyperlink” pointy cursor thing is set using a CSS rule… so folks with CSS but without JS (such as just about everybody running NoScript) thinks they can use it, but can’t.

    You should either set the cursor using JavaScript, too, or - better yet - make the link into a regular hyperlink.

    Otherwise, it’s just plain fabulous.

    By Scatman Dan on Monday, January 12, 2009

  • Awesome stuff, love the new design

    By Pyro-Dude on Wednesday, January 14, 2009