I recently built a new way to buy Crooked Gremlins’ merchandise. When we first started with the store, it was nothing more than a WordPress plugin that helped interface with PayPal. It was ugly, inconvenient and didn’t move any products. After seeing what Ross Nover had accomplished with Hilariawesome, I was inspired to create the Underdark Workshop.
Design
When I created the most recent iteration of the Gremlins’ site, I started using the Gotham font in most areas, such as the credits/update schedule and the buttons on the right of the post area. For consistency, I used Gotham again to create a typeset logo for the Underdark Workshop and the “Your Cart” button. I love a versatile font family like Gotham because its wide variety of faces allow for separation without alienation. Unfortunately, it’s becoming so ubiquitous that I may have to stop using it altogether. I think it will soon be known as “the new, unbelievably more expensive Helvetica.”
I decided to create visual modules for the products so we could add more as we saw fit. We have expansion plans for the store, like adding more tee shirts and eventually a book. Currently, each of these modules have to be added by hand. At some point, if I ever decide to create a WP theme based on this store, I’ll need to find a way to automate them a little.
Bits and Pieces
My favorite Javascript library, jQuery, plays a big role in the new store. These four plugins constitute most of the functionality:
- Tabs
- jCart
- ColorBox
- Sliding Boxes (not really a plugin, but I wanted to shout them out)
Mo’ Domains, Mo’ Problems
Originally, I wanted to use a subdomain of crookedgremlins.com (workshop.crookedgremlins.com) to encapsulate the store. That, plus a slightly modified logo, would make it clear that the function of this page is for users to buy stuff, which would hopefully inspire them to do just that.
But, I really wanted to piggy-back on the functions of WordPress and the ComicPress plugin as much as possible, and the drop-down strip-previewer was proving impossible to build without being part of the same WP installation. So I had to move the page inside the theme folder. That way, I was able to use a simple WordPress loop to grab the titles, URLs and preview images of every comic as it goes live, allowing the store to update itself whenever we add a new strip.
Some Gremlin History
TCG has been a big part of my life for almost three years now, and it has had a tremendous influence on my current career path. In fact, if not for The Crooked Gremlins, I might not be a web developer.
When I was ten, two of my best friends and I were really into tabletop games. This youthful obsession bled into everything, especially our budding creativities. We wanted to start making our own games, and we wanted to call our gaming company The Crooked Gremlins. We would later expand the operations of this company to include animations and short films as our ideas and interests grew.
I don’t know that any of that earlier material still exists, but the name stuck with us as we left behind childish things and entered high school, college and then the work force. About four years ago I was living in Burlington, Vermont, near one of my childhood friends, and we started talking about reviving the Gremlins. It wasn’t until a year later that we had anything resembling an online presence, and it was not very good.
But we had an idea for a website; a news blog owned and operated by some fictitious Gremlins that we would invent. We intended to create a community of writers and artists and filmmakers and gamers, and we wanted them all to be able to contribute work under specific categories, each of which would be “written” by a specific Gremlin. This was where I first learned to create customized content management systems, this specific one manifested in a Joomla! site.
My friend created an entire oligarchical structure to the Gremlin operation. There were different areas of expertise, which were called Ministries, and different Gremlins headed them. This generated some rather vitriolic and condescending content, much of which no longer exists on the Internet.
As the months went by, I learned more and more about XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and overall web design. The face of the site changed, starting from a community-built theme with a few modifications to the CSS to a full-blown customized Joomla! template.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough human (or Gremlin) capitol to generate any real interest in the site.
In January of 2008, I contacted an old friend of mine from high-school about repurposing content from his 1Up video game blog as reviews on our site. Eventually, he and I started talking about creating a webcomic based on the Gremlins. We picked four (Frank, Elrond, Retrac and Nick) and started the arduous process of making them funny. By that summer, we were writing and drawing two comics a week.
This shift inspired a move from Joomla!, which didn’t really have a viable system in place to deal with webcomics, to WordPress, which had the fabulous ComicPress plugin. It was this change that forced me to learn most of the things that would eventually become my business; building fully customized websites that can be updated by anyone, anywhere.
