Improved Jetlagged Website Coming Soon
I am very excited to finally write this blog post. If you've been following Jetlagged for the past 7 years, then I know you've suffered with my slow, inadequate website. And for that, I am truly sorry.
Complaints of slow loading times, no search function and lack of cartoon downloads have haunted my dreams for years. Why haven't I done anything about it earlier? Well, for two main reasons:
- Redesigning websites is timely and costly
- I'm lazy
Why am I able to finally deliver the comic website of your dreams? A big part of it is due to the amazing monthly support of my patrons. Because of them, I am able to afford the better website platform and keep it ad free. Thank you patrons!
Another reason is that I finally decided to merge my "comic's only" site with my online store. Before, my site had a link to my online store, but the site (which I hosted on Wix) was extremely slow to upload my cartoon images, even after I resized them and fiddled with the resolutions. What bothered me about having to do that, is that when a fan (like you) wanted to view a cartoon, it's quality wouldn't be at it's best. I want you to have the best! And I want you to have super fast uploading times too.
For a time, I used Wix's online shop platform, which I found extremely slow and not very user friendly. So I moved all my products onto Shopify's platform. Slightly more expensive, but there's no need to resize images and the load times are much much quicker. Also, it's extremely user friendly and easy to check out. With all of Shopify's super neat apps and features, it got me thinking...
What if my entire website were an online storefront?
Having a fast, ad free site for you to view and search for cartoons plus enable the option to download the cartoon outright would kill two birds with one stone. It suddenly dawned on me that I'd probably never have to move my website ever again. So I got to work, and I'm still working hard to deliver you a better website!
This will be a marathon, not a sprint. The main feature I want to offer is the "Cartoon Category" section at the top. There are 12 categories you can choose from to see cartoons. I have close to 500 Jetlagged cartoons (I think). Every single one of those cartoons needs to be uploaded, described, tagged and set into it's specific categories. Mathematically it looks like this:
500 cartoons x 3 minutes per cartoon = 1500 total minutes
1500 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 25 hours
I average about an hour a day, but I'm only able to get in about 10 cartoons an hour. This equation assumes 20 cartoons per hour, which I'm just not mustering. So I'm looking at 50 hours, or 50 days, roughly 2 months of hard work. If I keep up this rate, the new website release date will be sometime at the end of May.
This is a big elephant people. Every day I am uploading as many as my brain will allow without getting sloppy. It will take months of dedication, but it is my year's goal to have all of my cartoons, starting from 2012 til present at your disposal, all searchable and categorized.
Currently www.jetlaggedcomic.com is still hosted on Wix and will be slow and stubborn for the duration of this process. I can't help this right now, but just know that every day cartoons are being uploaded as "digital downloads" on www.jetlaggedcomicshop.com. From there you can search by tag, upload date or your own description. Eventually, once all the cartoons are uploaded, I will transfer my main site from Wix to Shopify and the two sites will merge to become one, single, beautiful www.jetlaggedcomic.com.
Thank you for bearing with me! I will keep you posted of the progress of the months. And please, if you have any suggestions for what you want to see on the new website, or certain functions, I'd love to hear them!