Today is the launch date for one of my largest web projects – an online web comic for a series called Friends With Boys.

This wasn’t my first experience designing a webcomic utilizing WordPress software. However the scale of this site was considerably different. I’d have a complete archive to work with in advance, hundreds of pages to schedule and the task of designing a website that not only suited the material visually, but would also be easy to navigate for a very large audience.

Creating a webcomic website with WordPress usually brings people to a theme bundle called ComicPress. It’s a popular one-click install that allows users to upload comic pages and have the system automatically create and schedule the posts that display them. I’d used ComicPress in the past but always ran into the same issues. While the system worked wonderfully when it everything was in tip-top shape, if something went wrong – a stray piece of code, a conflict with a web server – there was a huge sea of coding to sift through to find the issue and sometimes it just wasn’t possible. Often a complete re-install was recommended by the theme’s help team which put a huge time damper on the process. Theme editing was the easiest way to screw up the programming and was a huge undertaking all on its own when compared to making custom alterations on a more standard blogging site.

While I taught myself WordPress customization by making alterations to open source templates, over the past two years I’ve stopped doing that and instead prefer to code any theme from scratch. It’s much easier to maintain a website you know the complete ins-and-outs of, plus you learn a lot this way. With what I’d learned, I felt confident I could utilize WordPress as a webcomic platform without the use of ComicPress. I was too worried about something going wrong and not being able to fix it myself.

Creating Friends With Boys utilized a lot of different elements I wouldn’t normally need to utilize in a WordPress website:

• pages that change to accommodate varying comic page sizes
• utilizing blog posts as a comic archive + maintaining area for regular posts
• scheduling large quantity of ‘hidden’ advance posts
• custom image navigation for specific category

Overall this was a great website to work on – I learned a lot and really enjoyed working with the comics’ creator, Faith Erin Hicks. She’s a good friend of mine and we’d previously worked together on her online portfolio. I’ll be continuing to check in on the website and perform maintenance if needed for the duration of its time online.