Featured Site: Zip & Li’l Bit
ComicPress Version: 2.0 BE
Modifications: Heavy

Here’s an example of another site I had a hand in, once again, the design itself was completely done by the creator. Once you learn how to move the code around without breaking things, and get a firm grasp on CSS, pretty much any layout should be possible.

Zip and Bit is a unique case, perhaps explaining how it works could give some of you an idea of how to do things with a similar situation. Trade writes the Zip and Bit stories as books (around 60 pages) and then publishes them online a page at a time, twice a week. One book is complete and one was just starting so he wanted two sites set up nearly identical (just some color and header changes). So both sites were created in subfolders of the main domain, separate WordPress installs. The current developing story uses WordPress’ feature to publish the blog to the root directory, so going to the root domain URL gives you the current page of the current story. However, the subfolder name was added to the permalink structure, so that all the permalinks act like they are going to the subfolder. This way, if another book and subfolder are added in the future, this story can be moved back to it’s subfolder and all the permalinks will stay the same.

One nice touch Trade has always done that I think is great, is having a zoom feature on his lovely artwork. You can click on any panel of a comic to view a double-sized version of it. From this view mode you can now navigate the comic as well, panel at a time, making use of a Lightbox plugin.

Finally, the archive was also modified to something more suitable to a book, since Trade’s comics are more page based than name based, and have a set number that is not too high, the archive template file was changed to list the comics in page order as well as including handy thumbnails of each of page. Makes for a nice way to look at the whole book at a glance or find the exact page you are looking for.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Featured ComicPress Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.