Continuing with my reviews of free webcomic hosts, today’s host of choice is Comic Dish.  I’m going to start out this review with a simple statement: this is the best free webcomic I’ve ever come across. And that’s somewhat depressing, considering I’d never really heard of it until it was brought up by Samantha of Life’s A Witch in the comments to a previous review.  Seriously, how can a place this awesome be mostly unheard of?  Travesty!

PROS

CD’s interface reminded me a lot Drunk Duck at first, but quickly proved itself to be far more adaptable to both the advanced and beginner webdesigner. For the beginner, CD offers simple file uploads (browse and click), and point&click application additions to webpages. For the advanced user, CD gives you a file manager, importing abilities, and 2 types of HTML editors.

CD also has commenting, blog, archive page, news, calendar, gallery, RSS and storyline dropdown and stats abilities–and NONE actually require more than a simple click (and occasionally, clicking an informative link to “how-to” wiki if you are confused).  Your site is completely customizable, no ads are required (but your own can be placed at your discretion), and just…damn. It’s kinda like a 4-star hotel with room service.

I set up my Not Alone side-comic over there to test out the features, and it took me approximately 10 minutes to get situated once I found out where everything was.  I imported my comic pages from my own FTP, and they were posted in order via a choice of date formats in which my files were already named.  This is EXTREMELY useful, if say, I wanted to bring my 300-page War of Winds’ archive over there. I wouldn’t have to rename my files from YYMMDD to YYYYMMDD or something, because there are multiple formats to choose from. The archives were generated in order automatically from there.

I admit I have not tried to use all features, since I don’t normally use storyline dropdowns, but it appears that links, archives and cast features can all be edited ONLINE, and if the correct tags are already embedded in your webpage, new additions will appear automatically. Everything is nice and automatic and shiny.  Wow.

The CD community is full of informative, comic-minded people happy to welcome new members. That’s always a good sign! Nothing like saying hi in a forum where no one says hi back, right?

And oh yeah, if you have your own URL, not a problem. Looks like there’s a place to edit that as well.

CONS:

I’m a little hard pressed to find some, but here are the ones I decided on.

CD is new. You won’t have the benefit of a strong, tested, community like at larger comic hosts. This is something somewhat good (no drama, more personal help), but it means you won’t have the cross-advertising possibilities found in other places. This is a con that I sincerely hope I can cross out in time, but for now, CD needs to grow!  I would suggest more collaboration on cross-advertising between members, but I don’t even think that would work since there is no “brand” required. Man, you don’t even need a link to Comic Dish on your site! It’s difficult to cultivate a community interested in group growth when no branding is required, but I may be thinking about this too much like collective, and not enough like a webcomic host.

CD is so very free and awesome, I find myself wondering how long is it going to last? CG and DD pay for your hosting by requiring an ad, but CD requires nothing. I can’t even find a “donate for upkeep” link. Who is paying for this, and how? Even Xephyr.net has a donate link. I don’t want to say “too good to be true” because I don’t know the people in charge, but that is what paranoid me is thinking.

SUGGESTIONS:

Just for CD, I’m going to do this. I don’t know if they are taking suggestions, but what the hey, right?

The WYSIWYG editor is not named for what it does. It is only a code view, not visual.  “Advanced” and “simple,” fine, but I was so excited when I saw WYSIWYG and then so disappointed when it wasn’t that.  Kez was crushed :(

A preview function would be invaluable for template editing.  I have yet to see ANY host with this ability, however.  I GUESS tabbed browsing would work, but all the changes still go live.

Using the “simple” editor, it would be best if the page scroll did not reset to the TOP every time something was added through the simple editor.  Extremely annoying, not to mention disorienting.  Can this be fixed?

Have text links back to your admin account page and other  important edit links at all times (pages, templates, files). I was getting very angry trying to navigate between things. I did not want to be shunted back to the previous page every time I clicked “submit,” only to go back and edit things again. At the same time, when I needed a link back to the admin overview of my comic, I had to go through the dropdown menu. It was time consuming, even if I think your dropdown menu was a great way to save space. All the links don’t need to be there, but even a: “Comic Overview > Manage Files > Upload Files” format would be preferable.

Some clarification of where uploaded images/files go would be nice. Drunkduck is the only place I’ve seen that puts graphics in a “gfx” folder, not an “images” folder. For use in the tags where images are inserted, how about a reminder of the format in which image urls need to be posted if they are uploaded to CD already?  I had to fumble around for that. Did you want the WHOLE url? Would gfx/image.ext work? Did you need /gfx/image.ext like CG needs?  A little confusing. I feel stupid mentioning it, but I know if it happened to me, it’s happened to others!

All in all, Comic Dish gets a 9/10 for ease of use and features. It’s a good place to be, and now the top of my recommended list.

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Thanks all from me today! Up tomorrow is “Webdesign for the Beginner.”

Also, people linking here, I bought http://wingedwolfstudio.com today, if you’d like to link there. Slightly easier to remember.  I’ve noticed a lot of incoming links lately. I’m quite flattered, thank you, and thanks for reading!