If you’re using Project Wonderful and you have a friend who’s roughly on the same level as you, audience-speaking, you could reach an agreement: direct your default Project Wonderful ad to the other guy’s comic for a month or two. Total cost: zero.
Other nifty uses for the default PW ad: merch, donation page, a particularly good storyline. Remember! The space you have in your page is pretty valuable. Some people even call it “real state”. PW ads often go to the default on weekends on many comics, so don’t waste it!
You’ll probably have to make an exception with ad banners (everybody likes money, right?) but for the rest, yes. Try to avoid animation in your page, especially around the area designated for your comic. Animation results in distraction, and you don’t want things jumping and skipping around when people is reading your work. They won’t be able to concentrate properly. Animation means flash that moves or “breathes” or “pulses”, marquees, animated gifs, stuff that automatically scrolls, etc.
For the same reason, and EVEN taking in account we all like money and need money for like food and whores rent. There are some terrible ads in some networks, you know which ones. The ones that FLASH at you with colors that are probably only found inside Cthulu’s gaze, with some idiocy about being the 137637429847923873 visitor <– more on this later. These ads are simply not worth it. They pay very little and they annoy and drive your readers away. Skip them, ban them, BLOCK them. From existence.
A diamond is forever. No, wait, that’s not it. I meant: a DOMAIN is forever. Or at least until you stop doing your comic.
Thing is, your domain is your name on the intertubes. People will remember (or forget) you because of it. Every domain name, when starting fresh, is easily interchangeable. But as soon as you start promoting and the spider webs start crawling, changing your domain will probably kill at least half of your referrals. So, choose wisely.
A quick tip when chosing your domain name: don’t use hyphens or underscores. Why? Because people will constantly mistake one for the other. And no, I don’t care if Penny Arcade uses it. I read PA, and whenever I’m not on my computer and have to type it in the address, I make that mistake and it takes at least two tries. And well, Penny Arcade has all the visitors in the world and anexed galaxies, but when you’re starting, this kind of confusing thing is another loop for the reader to jump through in order to read your comic.
Another quick tip: if it’s not .com, .net or .org, don’t even bother. It’s not worth it, IMHO. Might as well buy tryitthreetimesandgiveup.com.
On weekends, I think I’ll just put a tip that doesn’t require a lot of explanations. So here it is:
Goes to show you, you’re always learning something. While browsing the archives of americanelf.com in my Ipod Touch, I realized how convenient is to click the comic image to advance to the next comic page.
Smart phones screens are tiny, and sometimes navigation buttons are too small for your fingers (in the case of the Ipod Touch, for example). I suppose it’s easier with a stylus, but still, not as convenient.
So in order to make my comics more smart-phone friendly, I implemented the clicking-on-comic as an additional “next” button. Do it too! One less hoop for the reader to jump through!