Large sites with multiple galleries going to be problematic?

Hi, I have an online comic with multiple episodes. I’m already up to about 20 gallery pages. Is this going to cause a problem at some point, apart from the fact I will have to scroll a lot to find things down the left side? im not going to overload sparkle or something?

There is no limit in the gallery or in Sparkle. The project file can grow and the time to publish can grow, but how to mitigate that depends on how you have it set up exactly.

Impressive! OK I’ll just carry on. I’m putting big images in and allowing sparkle to do its thing. Upload time doesn’t bother me. Will it get faster the second time i do it and I only change one or two things? I’m presuming it will. I’m also impressed that i can upload photoshop files without having to save them as png or jpgs. very good work!

Yeah the lengthy step is image compression, particularly if you pick the “best” compression mode. The image compression is only done once when publishing, and cached. The cache is specific to a publish location, so unless you change Mac or clear the cache, images won’t be recompressed on subsequent publishes.

that’s good to know. Should work well for me!!

@esther Is it possible to see your web comic?
I would be happy to take a look at it :smiley:

Hi, that would be really cool. I am creating the site again in sparkle, but at the moment it is still the muse site. I had to reduce the images for the muse site. so the old site is www.pacefiction.com Don’t look yet as it is still a muse site, but next week i will update it and change it to sparkle. The one little issue i’m having with sparkle is sometimes the gallery arrows and dots aren’t showing up in the preview. I’m away for a couple of days so will look next week.
Esther

HI Saeta,
I put the prologue up with flipbook comics after a lot of help from Franc. But I think i will change the navigation as the thumbnails for the episodes are actually just mini iframe versions of the large files, so are slow to load and not clickable.
Anyway, take a look, please. I would be really happy if you do.
Love esther

Thank you very much for letting me know.

The first thing I would like to comment is that the link you have put opens the site in http, and the navigation through the different chapters of your comic as well. It would be good if you redirect your site to https. Normally, this is done by adding a few lines of code in the .htaccess file.

It usually happens when upgrading older sites to https. You have to help the little machine to recognize the new status. :wink:

You can find several tutorials by searching for: “How to Force HTTPS”.

On the other hand, I would like to comment that I really liked your use of 3D for the comic. I’m more of a traditional comic, pencil and paper, although I work a lot in digital, of course. I have used Poser a couple of times, when I was working on cartoons, then I discovered that 3D is not my thing :sweat_smile:, and I really admire your work and your tenacity. :clap: :clap:

Now let’s talk about the web. For navigation, I think it’s best to keep the reader in the same browser tab, that is, not to open a new window for each chapter.
On the other hand, on the first three pages, you use images with a lot of texture. That’s fine, but you need contrast. I would recommend you to use the menu with flat colors, because otherwise you get a saturation of visual stimuli. You need to give the eye a rest.

The same for the text boxes. You can use the white rectangles traditionally used in comics. It helps the text to be more legible and you don’t need to put shadows on the letters or anything like that.

Also, the simpler it is, the better and faster the pages load.

There is a maxim in design that says: Sometimes, less is more. :pray:

Courage with the comic and 3D :muscle:

Hi Saeta, thankyou for looking and advice.

I thought I might make thumbnail of the comic click menu items, although it is a lot more work, but Franc thinks that is a good idea too. So you think change some of the information boxes to make them more plain and contrasty?

I draw a little but not very well so 3D suits me, but better postwork is needed to the images after rendering in 3D and i’m getting a little better with my postwork. I’m very addicted to 3D now.
Yes, Franc also said to change to https. But i will have to ask my host for help with that i think.
I will try and redo my website next week. I have a lot more episodes that i need to put back up.
Did you see the flipbooks? I think they look really cool. Franc introduced me to those.
Love esther

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Hello Ester.

I haven’t seen the flip-books on your website, where do you have them?

On the other hand, some time ago I saw a visual novel (Visual novel - Wikipedia) with a vignette that has a slight animation plus a box for the text that advances when you click on it. It’s made with Tumult Hype, and I liked it a lot.

I think many things could also be done with Sparkle, and maybe it will give you ideas for the new stage of your comic.

I find the presentation interesting, where he removes all ornamentation from the page to focus the attention on the graphic story.

The solution for the table of contents seems very good to me. I think something like this could work very well for your series.

Also, the navigation within the comic seems to me simple and successful. In Sparkle, it can be achieved with buttons, where you replace the button text with an arrow icon.

Good luck with it all.

Hi Saeta,

I changed my site to https so it won’t work now until I redo all the links which I will fix ina week. I’ll talk to u after that to see what u think
E

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My site has 235 pages, 896 images, and weighs in at 120 MB. Sparkle handles it without a hitch.

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Woah, Esther. This page turning effect is impressive! What is this? A PDF upload?

And the rest will come automatically with experience… just keep being critical with yourself … I’m sure in the nearer future you will just show us benchmarking sites here.

Welcome Marty, to this friendly and helpful forum. It’s a great community, and I’m sure you will find many useful idea’s, and quirks.

Best
Scott

Duncan, what happens to the compressed images if you go back back from Better Compression to Faster Publishing? Do the ‘Better Compressed’ images stay the same or are they recompressed?

Thanks Marty. It’s a pdf uploaded but you can upload images as well. It’s just an external gallery that I ftp to my website. It’s called Flip PDF Plus but you don’t need to have PDFs. Apparently you can put links into the PDFs so I will try that instead of that large arrow thing to go to the next comic. I"m surprised you can still see the comic as I thought I’d have to redo all the links now that i have https instead of http for my website. But i can’t look at my website for another 5 days as i’m super busy at the moment.

Images are always generated from the current settings, so they would be recompressed.