I’m writing this today as a response to what Rosscott said on the Webcomics Beacon podcast a while ago. To sum it up for you, Rosscott asked why we haven’t advanced comic navigation on the web. It was a remark that was pushed aside on the show but Rosscott came back to it later and thus created the challenge.

While I personally don’t feel the need to revolutionize the system, I do want to offer my idea for this project. Having said that, the following is kind of a long ramble of ideas and thoughts that I’ve been mulling around in my head regarding this subject. I have a few ideas that I think are solid, but I’m always open to suggestions and I’m going to try and make my whole thought process as clear as possible. So here goes:

The Challenge: Come up with a new way to navigate comics on the web

As a reader of online comics, I find it really frustrating when I have to click a lot of arrows in order to find what I’m looking for. If there’s one word that defines internet users, it’s laziness. We want to find what we want and we want to find it now! When I find a new comic that I enjoy, I often want to start at the beginning and read as many as I can. If I’m looking for something I’ve seen before, I want a way to easily find it and do something with it (since I’m searching with a purpose). All of these ideas on how to read online comics boils down to one central idea: organization.

When you put organization first, you start to see ways in which a comic website can be created for maximum viewing. The following idea is best suited for short story arcs or one off comics. You could used this system for items that require you to read from start to finish.

The idea: So imagine you’ve just landed on MyAwesomeComic.com, you’ll be presented with something like this…

MyAwesomeComic.com is broken up into two major parts: the content and the navigation. In my really rough drawing, the navigation is the dark green and will be used to move the reader throughout the entire site. In the hub you have the logo, standard previous/next buttons as well as popular comic tags/topics, open search, other content (store, about, contact) and a few ads.

Now the key part to notice about this system is how it moves and operates. In order to deliver content as quickly as possible, the hub should always be present and there shouldn’t be any page reloading. All content will be delivered dynamically, using a little spinning ball or something while the actual content is loading.

For Example: If you do a search for all comics involving phones, you would see the first comic pop up rather fast and then each comic would dynamically load after that. That way the user just has to go left/right (or up/down, back/forwards, doesn’t really matter) to get to the next comic. And as long as the system stays a few comics ahead of the reader in either direction, there should be no real delays in content delivery. An example of how this might look is if the comics were stacked on top each other and the reader “flipped” through them by going forwards/backwards.

Another way comics could be laid out would be a visual tree style. Once again, you do a search for all comics with the tag “phone” and your results page isn’t a list of comic names but rather a web of comic thumbnails. You’d then click on any of these comics to dive into it. Once you’re reading it, you could then scroll left/right, up/down or forwards/backwards.

So yeah, that’s what I have so far. I know it’s super rough and I only have 3 scribbles to start with but I’m hoping you get the idea. There are several other points that I didn’t touch on yet because they’re a bit hard to explain using only pictures.

Some other cool/required features:

• When moving between comics, you’d have to have a smooth transition, not just clicking/loading. I imagine it would be something like swiping on an iPhone or moving through the dashboard of the Xbox 360.
• Ads would always be present so you’d need a timer or pre-determined number of clicks before ads would update and reload. This way you could still use current ad delivery techniques to continually present ads to your readers.
• If you’re using the scroll left/right mechanism, you could put a 300×250 ad between comics.
• Each comic would need it’s own unique URL so people could easily share what they’ve found.
• It would be even cooler if people could share searches (Hey man, check out all these funny comics about hipsters on bikes!)
• Using cookies, you should allow users to “star” or “favorite” comics they like so they can easily reference them in the future.
• This system is built around the idea of a large screen, so mobile devices and tiny monitors might have problems with this.

The end: So yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. If you have any thoughts or comments, please let me know. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll probably attempt to build something more like a small video or more fleshed out HUD screens. I will openly admit that I do not have the knowledge required to pull something like this off. I do know that things like tag, unique URL’s and smooth page transitions are available today via Wordpress, Comicpress and Java/HTML5, so it’s really up to someone to just put it all together.

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