Whoops! Already skipped my first week on this blog. I forgot to post something last week. This made me decide to post as to why I am trying to keep up a blog.

Because, to be honest, I'm not really expecting anyone to read this except for a few people that accidentally clicked the links I post on social media. The main reason I'm doing this is the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When ranking the countless websites floating around on the net, search engines look at (among many other things) how 'fresh' the content on a website is when they decide to place a website high or low in the list. So, a website with less activity will place lower than one with more fresh, updated content. Seeing as I am only putting a new chapter online every month, I felt I needed something else to generate some content at least once a week. A blog seemed like a good fit. This is also why my blog isn't on any of the 'ready to use' websites (which would've been easier, with more features and more interactivity with other people): it had to generate content on my own web address.

SEO isn't the only reason though: keeping a blog updated can be a nice way of forcing yourself to organize your head a little. It makes me think of what I've done the past week and what I'll do in the coming. For now, it's almost more of a diary for me.

Anyway, new part online in two weeks!

2018/04/09

The 'first' (after the prologue) part will finally be online in six days! Next Sunday, we'll publish Worlds Apart: Part I and push out some extra promotion to reach hopefully some new people.

There were some last-minute changes to the story which required some redrawing of panels, but thankfully a reschedule wasn't necessary. I'm excited to have some more content on the website. After the publishing of part II, I plan on reaching out to some webcomic-related websites and see if we can get some response and extra exposure.

For now, here's a small teaser panel for the coming part!

2018/03/19

Worlds Apart: Part I is now online! This is where the story of Babu begins. We hope you'll enjoy it.

We're also working on the new navigation which seems to be coming along very well. Expect an update somewhere in the near future.

Not a lot of news aside from this, so that'll be all!

2018/03/25

Hiya!

This week, we've been working on some fixes for the problems people encountered. One of them was the navigation on the website when reading ODDfigures' Babu. There are a few things that bugged people:

- It's hard to figure out how it works;

- It doesn't feel intuitive enough;

- The scrolling is 'choppy' at some points;

- People want to be able to go back and forth between panels quickly when reading, the way it is now, inhibits this.

There, it's all out there. Now, to improve the navigation overall is going to take some more time (and more testing - should've done that before but hey, live and learn), but to get people on their way and fix the first problem, we've added a tutorial panel at the start of any chapter a new reader first views. After the first view, (hopefully) people will have gotten the hang of it and the tutorial panel won't show again. Of course, in the guide section of the website, people can review the tips on how to navigate Babu. We've also made some technical improvements that should reduce loading time a little.

Why did we choose to replace standard scrolling with our own navigation-system? Well, first off, normal scrolling was giving us trouble in combination with the fading panels. But besides that, we wanted to try to come up with a way to read Babu in a more 'immersive' way - not just a graphic novel on a website. Despite the start-up problems, we think we can improve our current system and get to a point that will make Babu more enjoyable to read. We've got more features planned, but before we get into that, we'll improve what we have now.

Anyway, a new part will be online in two weeks!

2018/03/11