Responsive Webcomics – The New Age of Online Comics!

2020 marked a decade of “Responsive web design”, a term coined by Ethan Marcotte. Responsive web design is an approach to designing websites, so that a web page “responds to” or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being seen through. That could be on a large desktop computer monitor, a laptop or devices with small screens such as smartphones and tablets.

According Statcounter, an internet monitoring firm, more users around the world are accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers. As of the writing of this article, the combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 53.1 percent, vs. 46.9 percent for desktop access. This makes it ever more paramount, that webcomic creators should focus on a mobile-first approach for their websites.

That’s where Toocheke comes in. Toocheke is a WordPress theme that was created with the webcomic creator in mind. It adopted the mobile-first approach with the ability to optimize the display of comics on all types of devices. It also gives the creator the ability to publish two image versions for each comic: one for desktop users and the other for mobile devices. A great example of how Toocheke implements this can be seen here.

 

 
You can also publish one version of the comic that displays in the horizontal format on desktops and the other version the displays the vertical format on mobile devices. This is accomplished by splicing the images panel-by-panel. This works best for the four panel, comic strip format but can be extended to other comic formats, so long as the panels are of equal dimensions. You can see an example of that here.

 

 
If you are looking for to publish your webcomic in the traditional(horizontal/print) format, or webtoon (infinite scroll/vertical format) Toocheke is flexible enough to fit the bill on both fronts. Toocheke also has a variety of layout options to suit your taste.

Take it for a test drive!

So, if you are curious to find out what all the fuss is about, feel free to try it out. Toocheke is available for free on the WordPress Theme Repository. There are also some tutorials available to get you started with building your website. If you are stuck, I am always happy to help! You can hit me up on Twitter(@toocheke) or email me.

Happy Tooning!