A screenshot of Karen Luk's WordPress-based illustration gallery site.

We decided to use with WordPress as a backend solution, because Karen was already familiar with its controls, veteran blogger that she is. The artwork and comics pages would be handled by Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery Plugin. The front page would need a custom template while the blog posts were renamed “announcements” and scooted off to the News section. And as always, I optimized the code for accessibility, both human and search engine. The design lent itself to clean, semantic markup.

I snapped the site together, and it was up and running in time for her to pass out business cards with its URL at the convention.

All in all, this was a fun little project, and it was great to have the chance to help out a fellow illustrator under the burden of a looming deadline. I frequently visit her site to see what she’s uploaded. Now go check out her work!

I kept the old “black and white and red all over” color scheme, and on the front page I mixed in an image of my alter ego off one of my business cards. The site had previously been coded in substandard CSS, and by now I knew better. At one point, I really wanted to show off, so I decided to make the layout, get this, based on the golden ratio and fluid (meaning it expands and contracts with the size of the user’s browser window–very tricky to do right while maintaining control over how things flow on the page).

I used grainy zip-tone and halftone screens to reinforce my comic book roots and made all my social networking sites much more easy to find, with links on each page or in context-sensitive places.

I wanted to build in my own gallery, but I didn’t like the Gallery2.2 script’s heavy reliance on table-based layout. Tired of gutting tables from my previous Rubifruit project, I nixed the the idea completely and linked to my preexisting DeviantArt account instead, which is good because DeviantArt is more socially active than a static on-site gallery and encourages through-traffic, but bad because I have absolutely no control over its layout nor is DeviantArt very “socially aware” (very few widgets that hook into other sites).

I also let go of my customize osCommerce shopping cart that I built way back when for an etsy shop. I figured etsy would offer more through-traffic, and thought it was worth a change, especially since I had made so many friends on etsy already.

A Commercial Approach

I tried to play up my skills as an illustrator and web designer on the new site instead of just promoting my comics, which are no longer the focus of my career. But according to Google analytics reports, people are getting lost when looking for just the comics. I have decided that Subculture of One cannot serve to both promote my comics and my web design. Thus, I made this site, The Pink Crow. I fully plan to overhaul Subculture of One once again, this time returning it to a more comics-focused theme.