Your Awesome Webcomic Isn’t Popular and Here’s Why.
Matt Gemmell’s article, Designing Blogs for Readers is a fascinating must-read for anyone who makes content on the web. In Matt’s article, he reflects on his own blog’s evolution and the lessons learned from the experience. He does an excellent job breaking down what’s important for a modern blog.
“I realised that I’d been focusing on my own obsession with what was possible, rather than what’s actually useful for the reader.”
That’s a bold statement.
Too often, when we create content, we neglect to consider how other factors, like readability, can influence how people perceive our work. This is especially so for those of us who work in a visual medium, like comics. For this discussion, I’m going to focus on the standard comic “strip” style comic, but there’s no reason why elements on this list couldn’t apply to long-form online comics as well.
Let’s assume your content (i.e. the stuff) is awesome. Here are the reasons your comic may not be getting enough visits (or repeat visits).
- The type in your word balloons is too small.
- The type in your word balloons has a font that is difficult to read.
- One and two combined.
- The colors on your site are too bright and tend to overpower your comic.
- You have white text on a black background (this causes eyestrain).
- The comic itself is too small (less than 1000px wide). People are increasingly viewing content on mobile devices.
- Too much crap on the main page, like widgets, blinking adverts, etc.
- No mailing list subscription option: this is a biggie for me.
- Ads interspersed within your blog content. Pop up ads are the worst.
- A Wall of Text (visually dense text) on the main page.
- A default WordPress/Comicpress template
I know I was guilty on several of the counts listed above. Hopefully my latest site redesign addresses most of those short-comings. Time will tell…
Content not withstanding, what are some of the reasons YOU don’t visit (or revisit an online comic site)?
Share your ideas in the comments below.
-Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
qka
May 22, 2013 at 11:04 pmDon’t revisit sites that don’t have RSS.
Aithene / Chris Wilson
May 23, 2013 at 12:15 pmI’d have to agree w/ QKA. Assuming I actually like the comic, the main reason I lose track is lack of RSS. I have an entire folder dedicated to comics in my Feedly account, and that’s how I track them.
If I have to bookmark it in the browser, its generally game over.
There are a number of reasons for this. (I noticed that I wrote these reasons based on Feedly’s abilities. I moved to this recently after being told that my Google Reader app was going to go away. Still, most RSS readers have similar abilities and the items should apply.)
First, of course, RSS readers in general are an easy way to keep track of your favorite sites.
Second, RSS Readers keep track of where I left off, and let’s me ‘catch up’ without backtracking. This is a real problem if the comic is regular and frequent. If I miss a few days, being dumped on the home page and having to try to backtrack to where I left off without bumping into spoilers is no fun.
Third, Feedly has a TON of sharing options built in. Not all sites have share buttons like yours does. Even the ones that do, if I want to share using your buttons, I have to additionally log into whatever networks I’d like to share on. In Feedly, the account information is already stored, so I can just click share and away it goes. And if I use the email option, it actually comes from my email, not a generic third party script that my friend may or may not trust.
Now that that’s covered, one word of warning to comics folks who do use RSS. If you choose to hide your comic from the feed to prompt the reader to actually visit the site (a pain, but acceptable) AND you choose not to put any text along with it, you basically end up with an RSS feed with no content at all displayed. Not a very enticing way to draw new readers in.
Becki
May 23, 2013 at 2:17 pmI tried posting a comment earlier, and had so many problems logging in to post the comment that it disappeared. Put this up as a reason not to revisit a page, if the comment section is difficult.
Blinking ads and extraneous/automatically playing video are two big reasons why I avoid sites. Older computers just can’t handle some of the videos that people love adding so much.
Krishna M. Sadasivam
May 23, 2013 at 11:18 pmBummer to hear about that Becki. I haven’t run into any problems with using Disqus. What login issues were you having?
Becki
May 28, 2013 at 3:38 pmSeveral times I’ve had problems logging in to Disqus to make comments. Sometimes I persevered, sometimes I gave up. Not sure where the problem was. However, if this comment goes up, maybe something got tweaked someplace that will make it a bit easier.
Krishna M. Sadasivam
May 29, 2013 at 8:21 amIt must have been a hiccup. Your comment came through just fine, Becki. :)
Joe Edens
May 23, 2013 at 5:40 pmI’m actually running into this very problem with my own longform webcomic. However, mine doesn’t really fall into any of your categories up there.
I’ve really been trying to conjure up ways to improve ease of navigation for a longform comic while still maintaining an RSS for the site.
I was thinking of having a static front page that would direct traffic to either the current site, a chapters list or to start at the beginning and see if that improves anything.