The internet has transformed independent comics and given creators an easy way to get their stories out to the public. There are a lot of different ways to publish your work online, but two of the most popular are WordPress and WordPress running ComicPress.
For most artists, computer code isn’t the first thing that they think of when sitting down to work on their stories. But depending on your knowledge level, either of the options above are fantastic solutions with a lot of options.
What You Need to Know
WordPress is a free open source blogging tool used by millions of people online for blogs and websites. Because it’s free, it’s perfect for independent comic creators on a tight budget. Using a blog is a great way to publish content since you can easily post, archive and tag content as well as get feedback and interact with readers.
WordPress is also an excellent Content Management System (CMS) that has a large community of developers. There are all kinds of additions (plugins) that can add to enhance your website and save you valuable time. WordPress uses a combination of HTML,CSSand PHP, so it’s relatively straightforward to learn and use.
You can use blogs hosted by another company if you choose and those work. But if you’re serious about publishing your comic online, it would be worthwhile to purchase your own webspace and then set up your website there. This gives you the ultimate control over what’s on your sites and how it looks.
If you’re looking for a slightly more advanced publishing platform, there’s ComicPress, which over the past five years or so has become increasingly popular. ComicPress provides you with the added functionality of displaying pages and navigation for these pages in your WordPress theme.
The WordPress/ComicPress combination is great for people who want to quickly and easily change how their site looks without a lot of coding experience. If you want to completely customize your website, it does get complex and you will need to understand coding, but we can get to that in later posts.
Fortunately, both WordPress and ComicPress have large communities and forums that you can dig around in for answers. These can be both helpful and frustrating since you can’t always find the exact answers to the problem that you are having.
Let’s start at the beginning…
If you’re just getting started, you need to evaluate what your skill level is. Even if you’re a complete beginner, there are a lot of resources online to help you through. Everything is extremely well documented online, so check out the links at the end of the article to get started. Once you’ve got everything installed, it is very straightforward. Some basics you might need to know are:
HTML – HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language used for web pages and it forms the basic building blocks of the web. Web browers read HTML documents (code) and then display them on screen for the user.
CSS – A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a language used to describe the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language (usually HTML).CSS is designed primarily to separate the document containing the content from the document pertaining to how it is presented.
PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general purpose scripting language. PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page.
Or, in summary:
1. Web pages are composed in HTML.
2. CSS tells the browser how the HTML should look.
3. PHP is dynamic code so that you don’t have to change every web page, just certain parts and those changes will take effect across the whole site. It also works with server based databases so that pages can call and receive specific content.
(There are probably better explanations than this, but that should help it make sense)
Where do I download the files?
Hopefully now you’re confident that WordPress/ComicPress is right for you. So get started by checking that your server provider is running a MySQL database to store all the blog information that you’re going to start to generate. Then you’ll need to install both WordPress and ComicPress on your server. All of this is well documented over on WordPress.org, so here are the links that you’ll need to get going:
Instructions on how to install it here.
Once you’ve got that up and running, download ComicPress here.
There’s a couple of extras and a step-by-step installation guide here.
There’s also ComicPress.net for more help (thanks Frumph for the info!).
Once you’ve done all of this, you should have a basic blog and comic website site up and running. It won’t look terribly unique, though – so in the next post in this series, we’ll cover some basic editing and customization, to start making your site more interesting!
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For the rest of the series click one of the links below:
So You Wanna Publish a Webcomic? – Part 1
So You Wanna Publish a Webcomic? – Part 2
So You Wanna Publish a Webcomic? – Part 3
So You Wanna Publish a Webcomic? – Part 4
So You Wanna Publish a Webcomic? – Part 5
You can see more of Jason Smith’s work at jsnsmith.com/ontheverge.
Nice article, Jason. I know for me, that one of the biggest frustrations of getting my work out there on the internet is the computer side of it. I just want to draw, dammit! Ha!
Anyway, I wanted to also throw ‘Webcomic ms’ into the mix, it’s a wordpress comic publishing platform (alternative to Comicpress) that I use, and really like for two reasons. Number one, I can publish multiple comics on the same day. Comic posts are not inherently tied to the day, like on Comicpress, and two, I can have multiple comics running at the same time. I know these features are going to be added in later versions of Comicpress (or are maybe already available but I’m too html illiterate to get them working), but I found Webcomic ms to be super simple to use and just an all-around plus.
http://mgsisk.com/webcomicms.net/
Comicpress does multiple storylines and more than one comic per day. However, I’ve checked some videos about Webcomic ms and it seems to be much better designed so I’m gonna test it in a local server. Nice recommendation Max!
Yeah I thought it might, I remember when I was looking into it it seemed there was some kind of workaround. But it’s really straightforward with Webcomic ms. Anyway, I recommend it.
Hey Lisandro, I’ll definitely try to cover off something about multiple storylines in future posts because I’ve had to figure that out for my stuff as well.
Thanks for the feeback. There are definitely a couple of different platforms that you could use – or just stick with plain blogging if that works for you. When I was just starting out, ComicPress was recommended to me and I know a lot of others are using it as well. That’s what I’ve explored myself for everthing related to webcomics.
It might be interesting to try out the same things with both platforms and see how it goes. Maybe that’s a thought for future posts…
You beat me to it! I’d also recommend Webcomic over ComicPress. Particularly since the more modern versions of CP got very PHP heavy. Their video tutorials are also great to get a beginner started.
I’ve never heard of Webcomic. I’ll have to look into this one sometime.
Great article Jason!
This is quite the informative article Jason. I use WordPress with Comic Press and am pleased with it so far, but have not actually started posting pages yet so it’s possible I could change my mind later.
Hi there, You’ve done an excellent job. I will definitely digg it and personally suggest to my friends. I am sure they’ll be benefited from this site.