It was, to put it mildly, unbelievably horrible in every conceivable way. The jokes were dumb, the art was of poor quality, and then there was the website itself; a discordant mélange of political rants, aimless blog posts and confusing complexity – an affront to all things good whose design thankfully doesn’t even haunt the Wayback Machine anymore.

No. 4 : The fifth major iteration of The Crooked Gremlins website, or Mark 4 (I no longer count the Joomla! version), was conceived and executed in about 6 days.

This rapid deployment is thanks, in large part, to how easy it was to hook into ComicPress.

Take a look

No doubt about it; during the initial months, the site was really bad. I was personally responsible for some really bad content and some really bad design.

And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

You can’t fear failure to the point where you don’t even try something. If you do, you will never get any better at it. You also can’t fear the unknown; to allow whatever thing it is you’re doing to evolve, even if it’s into something completely different than what you initially planned.

From Joomla! to WordPress + ComicPress

After abandoning the initial concept for the site (see Some Gremlin History, bottom of Rebuilding the Store), the site needed to be re-built from scratch using WordPress instead of Joomla! I wish I could say it’s because I knew that Joomla! had certain limitations and I would stop using it in favor of WordPress for design/development reasons, but really it was because Joomla didn’t have a good solution for displaying comics.

I’m glad that was the case. WordPress is much easier for me to create templates/plugins for, and the administration back-end is something I’m actually comfortable asking a non-tech-savvy client to use. Of course, none of that mattered back then. I just went with the easiest solution for uploading/displaying comics. Turned out to be a good career move.

We only had about 15 comics at that point, so migrating the content wasn’t much of an issue. But I still didn’t know much about building websites, so I was stuck with whatever slight modifications I could make to the ComicPress 3 Column template.

A marked increase in the quality of the art over the last two years.

The Long Goodbye

The reason I mentioned fear and short-sightedness before is because I was still caught squarely in the grip of my own trepidation when developing Mark 1. As you can see, I was unwilling to simply jettison the stuff that wasn’t working.

The “Blog” and “Project” areas of the site would actually stick around for two more iterations. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that having those areas on the site didn’t mean that I would ever actually write anything worth reading for them.

It wasn’t until Mark 4 that I finally erased the last surviving remnants of the old Joomla! site, allowing them to fade into Internet infamy where they belong.

Sidenote: I know it’s a little hypocritical to say that you should get rid of things that aren’t any good and keep doing a thing so you get better at it. It’s all about narrowing your focus so you keep improving the things you’re passionate about and not get bogged down by the things you didn’t really care about it in the first place.

The New New Store

After I rebuilt the store not all that long ago, something horrible happened; I accidentally uploaded a broken version of the store to the live site, overwriting the files and completely losing all functionality. Which was okay, because nobody was buying anything anyway. Also, it gave me an excuse to take another look at Javascript shopping cart scripts. JCart was too complex and I kept finding new ways to break it. I wound up using SimpleCart.js, and I’m really happy with it.

A really cool new feature is the Comic Preview for the prints. After someone selects the comic they want from the dropdown menu, a thumbnail of that comic (using the comic_archive() function from ComicPress) shows up. Clicking on that thumbnail fades in an overlay of the full-sized comic.

Paul and I are in the same physical ZIP code now, so we can both sign prints before sending them off to people. But since not everyone will want their beautiful $10 print scribbled on, there’s the option to not get it signed.

Using jQuery + SimpleCart.js, it was easy to add options like this to store items. Each item name tells us specifically what the person is looking for, and it’s super-easy to modify what’s available in the store (like when a particular size of tee shirt sells out) thanks to WordPress 3.0′s Custom Post Types.

What’s next?

The next year is going to be big for us. We’re going to start researching conventions for next year, during which time we’ll have a much larger array of merchandise. It’s for-serious time.