Q's about webcomics

[Rok Ninja]

hello people, I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this topic but anyways. I've been working on starting a web comic for fun and something to use in a portfolio but have a few question (mostly stupid ones)

1. when naming a comic, is the a way of finding out (easily) if that name is taken.

2. do you have to apply for copy right for your characters and stuff.

3. what are the key thing to include on the webpage.

I think xepher net is awesome and am currently following a number of sites hosted here and everyone is real friendly. sorry it i posted this wrong. XD

[tickyhead]

1. Google. Seriously. Just put quotations around the webcomic's name ("Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures" for example) and you're good.

2. Under American copyright law, everything you make is automatically copyrighted to you, and only you, the minute you make it. Getting an actual copyright is mostly a formality for legal rights, though I forgot the specifics...something like a person without an official copyright can only sue for damages, while someone who has a copyright can sue someone for everything they're worth. Don't quote me on that, I'm probably wrong. It also varies from country to country, granted, but...I'm American, so you get the American rules.

In short, no.

3. The comic. Everything else is optional. I read great comics that have nothing but the comic archives up and occasional news blurbs when they update; no wallpapers, cool extras, cast bios, or even an about page.

That being said, it's still nice to have extras and more info, especially if the comic is a bit confusing.

----

To be honest, I have no idea if this is the right section either. Maybe Know-How Trading Post, Art, or Misc. Content? Meh.

[sagebrush]

3. The comic, navigation buttons, the title of the comic and your name, how you can be contacted (email), the update schedule, a blog (if you have one for the comic).  Additional pages can be about you, the story, the characters, your purpose, and any extras you want to offer.

[tapewolf]

1. when naming a comic, is the a way of finding out (easily) if that name is taken.

As they say, google.  However, if you're planning to go the whole hog and buy a domain name for it, use whois or something like that to see if it's available.
'Project Future', for instance is actually named after an obscure game from the 1980s, though it also refers to the underlying project in the first two story arcs (the protagonist in the story having stolen the name from the game himself).  It's also a play on the original story title, "The Future History of Jakob Pettersohn"... the comic version being a separate project that I was half expecting to crash and burn.

But I digress.  While searching for available domains, I found that projectfuture.org, projectfuture.com and project-future.com were all taken by housing projects, grand visions and other such stuff.  I was actually surprised that project-future.org was available... if it had been taken I'd have gone for projectfuture-comic.com or something like that.

3. what are the key thing to include on the webpage.

What I did was see how my favourite comics did it, and then use that as a base.  The layout is liable to be redesigned in future, though.

[Rok Ninja]

cool thats for the answers and yay i know to use google and i found no comic with the name i intend to use but paranoia makes me ask

[Miluette]

http://warofwinds.com/winged-wolf-studio/ Read this! Things good for any webcomicer to know.

And make sure your archive is easily navigable!

[Pedes]

3. what are the key thing to include on the webpage.

Clearly visible and easy to use navigation buttons!!! I've seen too many that had strangely placed ones.
Update schedule.
Info about yourself.
Basic info about the comic (so people don't have to read 20 pages before deciding it's a genre they hate)
Place for news (info of delays and hiatus XD)

[Databits]

I'd like to point out that the person in that article is off on some things. He outlines that there are 2 phases in the site development process. This simply is not true.

There are in actuality 3 or more. The first phase isn't the design phase at all. It's layout, which shouldn't be confused with design. Content layout is a very important and key aspect to your sites accessibility. Your layout is in essence a sort of framing for your design, but it has a lot more significance. Generally it's best to put together your site in the most basic means possible. If it's at all possible to apply content that you'd be using in the final design (news articles, banner stand-ins, site location, navigation, etc...) it's not a bad idea to put some of this into the basic layout. Layout is in fact a coding phase, but when I say "simple" design I mean simple. No pretty bordering, no pretty images, background, javascript driven slideshows, or anything like that.

Once you are through the layout phase and have a good idea how you want things to display on your site. THEN you enter the designing phase. This is the point where you take the layout that you came up with which works with your content, and make it look pretty. You can use many tools to do this as he stated. I know many people who do things all the way from freehanding designs to using stuff like photoshop. When coming up with your site design, there's one thing you should always keep in mind. You're making a website, not a poster. While a website can be a work of art, that's not as important as it being functional. If your site is a really pretty poster design, but difficult to use, you've failed.

After you have your design, you'll need to actually apply that to your layout. At this point you should have a really good idea both how you want your HTML to layout, as well as how you want it to look. This is where the really intricate HTML and CSS stuff comes in (as well as Javascript on occasion).

Then you start getting into even more in depth things which may or may not apply to you. Such as server side scripting to take your site design and apply it as a template to your content dynamically.

To recap... never, ever, ever, start by just drawing something out. That's horrible design practice. Always start with your *basic* html layout, then do your design artwork for that layout, finally apply your art to the layout. Doing this will help ensure that you're not biting off more than you can chew for the more intricate design work.

[Miluette]

You're saying you shouldn't sketch out the visual structure of your highly visual website first and just jump into html first?

The ways she put it was a bit off from my teaching and practices, but you should definitely sketch out your website first, and it sounded kind of like she meant that. Sketching things out, whether you're starting with the basic blocks/skeleton or your fully fleshed-out concept, is always a pretty good thing to do first, especially for people who are already visual (read: make comics). Making it work efficiently and effectively in code is most important afterward. Of course you should keep in mind when laying out and designing (which can happen both at once, mind) that your website should function as a website no matter how pretty it is, and she does mention this repeatedly elsewhere in the blog.

Someone like me, who is just about as comfortable with designing sites as she is with drawing, can do these things pretty much simultaneously, but the importance of laying things out visually lingers with me.

[Databits]

That's exactly what I'm saying. Sure that method is fine when you're drawing a poster, but it's still bad practice to go straight to drawing how things will look. I've worked on quite a few large scale professional sites now. I can assure you that while that practice may work for something really small like a personnel site, it sure as heck fails in larger scale team-oriented setups.

You always start with a basic layout, get your content into place where it needs to be, and THEN make it more visually appealing. You need to figure out what exactly you're going to be working with. In my case, I'm one of the primary programmers on our web development team. We generally put the absolute basic stuff into place for the designer because we know what content the system will have initially, or at least what sorts of features it will have. We then leave it up to the artist to build a stylized design to replace the basic layout design (sometimes things move but generally not often).

Keep in mind that my views on this are influenced by working for a professional development company in a team. Not soloing everything.

[Miluette]

If you're working with a whole bunch of people, it'd probably save you some time to do things that way, yeah. I'll assume it's something like people's current treatment of the basic default ComicPress layout - barely anyone modifies it, and those who do barely do it notably structured differently from the default. Few take it as far as they could, but they don't have to, because it's already basically professionally structured, nice, and organized for them. You could do crazy creative stuff if you want, but you hardly have to.

Someone with whom I work occasionally has a few sites designed like that, and I've noticed this about big sites as well... designed via CMS or something similar, there's little variation or advancement in structure from site to site, so all that changes are a set of very simple graphics, hehe. It's a good system.

/end web layout nerding! XD