The Invisible Art

ver the years I’ve put a lot of hard work into the story and the artwork of the Wormworld Saga Digital Graphic Novel. However, another field in which I invested a lot of time and effort probably gets overlooked by many readers: the design of the website. To be honest, I myself are guilty of overlooking all the hours of coding that went into the Wormworld Saga Website. While I have meticulously documented all my work hours on the graphic novel (at the end of 2020 I tracked 5196 hours), I have actually no idea how much time I spent on hacking new lines of code into the text editor or moving around the bits and pieces of the layout in Photoshop. After 10 years, I thought, it could be interestig to take a step back and have a look at the different iterations the Wormworld Saga Website went through. Every new phase of the project is somewhat reflected in the different versions of the webdesign and each and every one, I found, holds nostalgic memories for me.

By the way, I don’t have running versions of all the old website versions. The screenshots that are featured in this article are all created from the layout files that were created in Photoshop and then meticulously put together in a text editor. I’m a little bit proud of the fact that the whole Wormworld Saga Website is done by hand. I didn’t use tools like Dreamweaver or any content management tools in the process. That of course means that parts of the website are a little bit clunky - I’m not a coder after all - but without any heavy frameworks in the background, the website is pretty light weight on the code-side. Not on the images-side though...

When it was time to publish Chapter 5 of the Wormworld Saga, I realized that my website was too cluttered with all these little panels and banners. I got rid of the translation buttons on the homepage and arranged the chapter covers in a horizontal row. I still couldn’t manage to get rid of all the little banners but it was a step into the right direction.

The Attic subscription area never really worked and around the time I pulled the plug on it, it also turned out that the Wormworld Saga App didn’t make sense anymore. The frequent update cycles of the operating systems on apple and android devices made it too expensive to maintain the app. I was also longing for a simpler design of the website and at some point I decided to get rid of all the small banners and replace them with one big slider banner.

Another big thing of 2016 was the addition of the “Art of the Wormworld Saga” digital artbook to the website. I created a ton of interesting Making Of content for the Wormworld Saga App. After the app was shut down, I didn’t know what to do with that content. I figured that the Wormworld Saga Website could become the new home for that content and that was the birth of the Patreon login. If you support the Wormworld Saga on Patreon, you can use your Patreon account to log into the Wormworld Saga Website and the special content is unlocked for you.

I’ve compiled this recap of 10 years of Wormworld Saga web design in late 2020. I guess this little article will soon become a historical document itself. And I guess the Wormworld Saga Website will go through many more changes in the years to come. Websites in themselves are kind of becoming a thing of the past. People spend a lot of their online time on social networks. Things have to move fast in order to capture their attention. I’d like to think of the Wormworld Saga Website as this precious thing, hidden in a dark corner. When you step beside the streamlined experience of sleek and modern web design, when you leave the crowded data highways, when you navigate through the lesser known wrinkles of the internet, you might find a glowing, glittering treasure chest full of adventure: The Wormworld Saga Website.

I'm really happy that YOU found it!

-DanieL