Capes & Babes, a webcomic by Chris Flick

Matt Stout and I had another great Lightbox Podcast recording session tonight where we talked quite a bit about the Wibiya toolbar that’s at the bottom of my site. I’m going to write up an additional blog post tomorrow (Friday) that highlights some of the things we talked about.

But for now, it’s late and I’m hitting the sack.

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Okay, I’m back from my nightly slumber and I thought I’d talk a little bit more about the Wibiya toolbar…
First, I want to thank everyone who took the time and gave me their own personal feedback over the bar. As I talked about during the Lightbox Podcast with Matt Stout last night, it seems that from the input I got from my friends, the majority of people hate it – and they hat it for a variety of reasons.

My web designer friends hate it because of the Live Notification “pop-up” box.  Others hate the Live Notification box because, on their laptops, the pop-up window obscures the last panel of the strip. Some hate it because they think it looks completely alien on my site (even though I tried to make the green of the bar blend in as much as possible to the green color scheme of the current site re-design). Overall, the overriding consensus I got yesterday was that I should get rid of the bar. But I’m not going to and here’s why…

As much as I understand why my web designer friends hate intrusive things like this web bar being on a particular site, I think it’s important to realize that not all websites are one and the same. Some websites are functional. Some are informative. Some are entertainment. I don’t believe all websites should look, function or act the same. Some people detest videos on websites as the upload can sometimes be slow, clunky or just a pain in the butt… yet, that doesn’t seem to have hurt ESPN. The videos on ESPN are a unique part of their website – and people have come to understand that.

For me, having a webcomic website is completely different than all the other websites I have ever designed or been a part of. The audience is different. The “message” is different. The goals are different. On my personal portfolio site, I have no ads. I have nothing that even comes close to looking like a Wibiya toolbar. I don’t even have a Twitter feed box so people can follow my Tweets while they are looking at my portfolio. All of that stuff would be grossly unneeded,  misused and completely unprofessional for that site.

But for Capes & Babes, I’m trying my best to build a community, to get people personally invested in the characters of the strip and, perhaps, even myself. Plus my goal is to make it self sustaining so I am able to travel to conventions and meet people who might be fans of the strip. Unlike my portfolio website, Capes & Babes NEEDS to be as interactive as much as possible – and the Wibiya toolbar makes that just a little easier.

Having said all of that though, I have listened to what you all have said about the bar. I haven’t gotten rid of it completely for the reasons stated above, but I have made significant changes to the bar to try and find some sort of compromise between liking the bar myself and appeasing the people who might be turned off by it. For example, for now, the Live Notification box is gone. That doesn’t mean it won’t ever appear again. Instead, I will only use that pop-up box to announce very special things like a convention appearance and where I might be located at that particular convention. I have edited many of the social media icons to make them a little less obtrusive but still keeping them in the bar. I have also removed some of the other more “bells & whistles” apps of the tool bar as well. In short, I have tried to streamline it while still keeping it functional and relevant.

I also thought it might be handy to point out that if these changes still aren’t to your liking, you can always use personal control and shorten the bar so that it is practically invisible to your experience. All you need to do is click the double arrows at the right side of the bar and it will collapse. I don’t know if a lot of people realize this but that’s one of the first things I discovered about the bar and why I thought the benefits would outweigh the negatives.

I also thought it might be beneficial to highlight some of the things I personally like about the bar and detail them in the screenshot below:

Again, I am fully open to discussion about this tool bar. I’d still like to hear more feedback about it – have the changes I made satisfactory? Are they now a little less intrusive to you enjoying the strip? Are you STILL a Wibiya hater? Are there actually any Wibiya FANS out there? And if so,  WHY are you a fan? How do you use your Wibiya bar?

Just understand… because this is a discussion, there are no right or wrong answers and it’s always a give and take. I am interested in hearing your opinions but, hopefully, you will be interested in my return comments as well. After all, isn’t that how we learn from one another?

-Chris