I’ll be giving a workshop on extending WordPress as a CMS at function pink() in Raleigh on August 31st.

“In the past few years, WordPress has risen to dominate the blogging arena. But it’s not just for blogging anymore! Since version 2.8, all sorts of goodies have been added to WordPress’s core that let you expand its functionality from mere blogging software to robust CMS. Things that once required a slew of plugins can now be done with a few edits to your functions.php file.

In this talk, you will learn how to make a child theme and extend it with custom post and content types, custom taxonomies, menus, post images, and more. Once you learn these simple techniques, you can start configuring themes to do almost anything, from dynamic image sliders to art galleries. Before you consider another CMS, before you install a complicated plugin, check out what a little WordPress dev can do for you!”

September 17-18th 2011, NC Dev Con: ”Comics and Design: How to tell stories with pictures and words.”

Every site has a story. It’s our job to help translate that story into words and pictures, to hold the attention of  visitors and lead them to the “happy ending,” be that clicking “buy” or filling out a contact form. I used to make comics for a living, and I find that the skills I learned making comics help me tell better stories with my web designs. I’m thrilled to be talking about it at NC Dev Con! I hope I’ll see you there!

Custom post types vs. Custom post formats

My WordPress menu for managing comics

What is the difference between a custom post format and a custom post type? Actually, it’s a semantic nightmare. “Custom post types” actually should be called “custom content types” or “custom page types” because they aren’t “posts” per se. They behave more like pages, i.e. they don’t have RSS feeds (without tweakery), they don’t organize like blog posts, etc. “Custom post formats” is more like a distinction granted to your posts. They show in your RSS feed, in your blog archives. It’s a less messy, more intrinsic sort of categorization system. For instance, you could have post formats for “quotes” or “asides”.

Currently I’m using custom post types to organize and upload comics. This means that you manage comics through a “comics” menu the same way you manage posts in WordPress. They are separate, distinct entities on the backend.

But, what if it makes more sense to have comics as a post format? That means when you want to post a comic, you’d do it like you were posting a new blog post, just adding the distinction that this post is a comic. The comic post would then appear in your main RSS feed, lumped in with any other blog posts you might be making. Personally, I want to keep my blog posts and my comics feeds separate from each other, but maybe that’s me?

To settle the matter, I sketched out what the information architecture for both these options would look like.

Comics, blog posts and gallery posts structured with custom post formats

Unorganized WordPress Web Comic theme Information Architecture

This is obviously way too unorganized for me. Look at that long tail of sequentially uploaded content. If you tried to read from one end of it to the other, you’d be interrupted all along the way by unrelated content. Gallery post, blog post, comic post, blog post, ad infinitum. Maybe there will be some nifty way to separate those formats into distinct flow-paths, but this is a new feature in WordPress, which means that it will be six months before I can really do any backflips with it. (I had a helluva time just getting get_terms to paginate!)

Comics, blog posts and gallery posts structured with custom post types

(My) organized WordPress Web Comic theme Information Architecture using custom post types

This is an m-shaped information space. Look at how the blog, the gallery and the comics are separate, each with their own RSS feed, their own archives, and separate “flows”. There’s no way for any of the flows to cross paths. There is no archive page where your art, comics and blog posts are vomited up on the page in chronological order, much to the horror and confusion of a would-be reader.

Why does this matter?

Search Engines

When your site is getting crawled, spiders like to “feel” an underlying structure. “Ahh, this is an archive page for a comics series. Oh, here’s the blog. Yes, I see.” A T-shaped or long-tail content structure doesn’t help search engines form these distinctions.

Data Manipulation

It’s also easier to manipulate separate content types. You can give a custom content type its own RSS, its own archive page, its own search. If you used a custom post format, you’d have to find a way to separate its RSS, its archives, its search from the others. I find subtractive coding way harder than additive, so I personally prefer to build up rather than tear down.

Usability

I also think that the special comics menu item (shown earlier in this post) will make adding and managing comics easier for users.

Conclusion

In the future, I may eat my own words and custom post formats may turn out to be the more robust, intuitive solution. But right now its too new and too troublesome to restructure. I will be using custom post types for the new theme, believe it.

I have a lot of ideas about how to design the new site, but I’m designing for an audience, not myself. So it behooves me to ask them what they want. After putting up a “coming soon page” (covered in a previous article), I ran two surveys past my readers, soliciting them through my livejournal, DeviantArt, Twitter and Facebook. I’m sharing the results here for the benefit of the comicking and design communities.

Today let’s investigate my first survey, where I asked readers themsleves, their online habits, and their relationship with my comic. (We’ll look at the second survey tomorrow.)

Who is reading my comics?

Most respondents fell into one of three categories:

1. First wave female fans. These young women are about my age and they found me through gURL.com back in the day. They are usually in college or starting their first job. Very tech savvy, mature, and devoted.
2. Second wave female fans. There are fewer second-wavers than first-wavers. These young women found my comics after I went on hiatus by poking around the gURL.com archives or by stumbling over my work by accident. They tend to be tweens and teens, usually smart, subculture-y types, manga and anime fans, who prize individualism.
3. Male fans. This is the smallest group of readers I have, but they are some of my most dedicated readers. They usually find my comics either by meeting me in person at a convention or through their female relations, be it a girlfriend or a sister. Most have tech-based jobs and are hard core geeks, and of all the groups, they have the most money to spend, as first-wavers are paying off student loans or making major life purchases like cars and second-wavers don’t have credit cards yet.

Most respondents have been reading for 5-8 years. That’s a long retention time for a comic that’s been on hiatus 3 years!

What sites are they using?

Facebook took the lion’s share with a whopping 86% of respondents claiming to use it on a regular basis. Next came DeviantArt (60%) and Twitter (33%). Myspace came in last with only two people vouching for it. However, if I had solicited responses on my MySpace page, the numbers would be skewed in that site’s favor.

Why do they like my comics?

It was clear that readers love Tuna, the smart-alecking black cat character. (I can never write Tuna out of the comic now.) But aside from the talking kitty, readers repeatedly cited the snarky female lead, gothic sensibilities, and tightly woven plots as what made them fall in love with the series. Many people repeated that Rachel the Great only looks like a girly-girl manga.

I was surprised at how often the same words kept turning up. So many people used the same phrases over and over again that I had to take note of them: Can relate to, funny, intelligent, refreshing, true-to-yourself, feminist, not too girly girl, original, issues, emotions, fun, relatable, humorous, witty.

How and when do they want comics updates?

44% of respondents said they would pop by the same day every week with no prompting so long as I updated on the same day each week. 26% said they’d just visit randomly and catch up. As for actually receiving updates, 32% requested email alerts, 28% requested Twitter, and only 16% would use RSS (although they were very adamant that there be RSS). For the 19% who responded “other”, they mentioned livejournal and Facebook as avenues for updates.

People either didn’t care what day new comics get posted, or if they did care, they preferred Wednesday because it’s “Hump Day.”

These findings suggest that:

1. I need to update on a regular schedule and
2. that I need to ensure users can subscribe to get email alerts when new comics go live, something I can do quite easily with Feedburner.

What features are most important to them?

I gave participants a list of different features I thought they might like on the site in addition to weekly comics. I had an idea of what I wanted, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time building something if my readers didn’t want it.

I’ve decided to hold off on building a gallery because so many readers also have DeviantArt accounts. It would be much easier to prominently link to that community, and I’m more likely to upload art there for the external validation that community offers then be too tired to do it all over again via WordPress. I’ve added a “recommended reading” blogroll to my comic pages’ sidebars, and the blog is coming built-in. I haven’t started attending conventions again, so I don’t need to worry about that one just yet, but it’s nice to see so many people excited about that prospect. My take-away from this is that after the site launches, I need to start extending my theme to include a merchandise shop.

Mobile device use

I asked, “Do you havea mobile device, like a phone or PSP that you use to read comics? If so, what device?” Of the 57 participants, 6 reported owning an iphone, 1 reported owning a Droid, and 1 reported a Nintendo DS. 6 iphones may not seem like a lot now, but it’s worth keeping in mind for th future.

Things I will do differently next time

I wish I had asked where people read web comics. Are they in a quiet dorm? Sneaking a peek at work or school? Behind a firewall that blocks sites that use bad words? Are they rushed or relaxing? I don’t know what my readers’ context is, and knowing that would help me design a web comic experience that facilitates their situation. For instance, if the majority of my readers are sneaking a peek while their boss isn’t looking, I don’t want the site to have a bright pink background, or I risk getting them in trouble if their boss glances in that direction.

Why you should run surveys, too.

You should run surveys, too, because it will help you better understand your visitors. We often think we know who we are writing for and what they want, but as one of my fans once told me, “Assumptions make an ASS out of yoU and ME.” It’s easy to go to far and overlook something important to your readers. There could be problems you didn’t even know existed. Communication is key. Love your readers. Serve your readers.

Tune next week for the results of the second survey, where we’ll learn how to design a web comics site for the ultimate reader experience!

In the old days, I uploaded comics by hand to my own site, a long and necessarily arduous process. Going forward, I’d like to spend more time making comics, less time fussing with code. WordPress 3.0 was released soon after I decided to use it as my CMS, and it was just in time! 3.0 introduced custom content types on top of custom taxonomies and post images. With these three improvements, I don’t have to use  ComicsPress, a popular WordPress theme for web comics. ComicsPress is great, especially for comickers who don’t build web sites for a living. But I have special archiving needs for multiple comic storylines, and I also don’t like the standard web comic UI, which I will get into later.

Simply put, I think I can do better.

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling building my web comics site, from concept, to reader surveys, to design and completion. I was going to save up all my material and make one big case study with it, but I realized that my dislike of wading through that much information meant that it would most likely rot on my hard drive for all eternity rather than be published online where people might actually make use of it. And believe you me, I’ve dug up some pretty interesting stuff about how people read comics online.