I am going to be super harsh, but it's for your own good, I think! This is my subjective opinion and you are allowed to hate me for it. Maybe it's a great design and I just suck.
General site design... I think maybe you'd be better off with
-a smaller, less intrusive logo
-ditching the flashy IRC link
-ditching the links on the right-hand side to digg, facebook etc
-losing the twitter feed
-losing the archives dropdown over the comic
-removing the quote by Athena
Basically, make sure what gets the attention is the comic, not the extras. The comic is what you're trying to get people interested in, slogging through added extras is just an annoyance - twitter, for example: You're an artist just starting out, so you don't have a lot of regular readers. Regular readers are the only ones who care about the author whatsoever. Right now it looks like you're putting yourself before the comic, that you're doing this for attention, which is not a good thing. Finally, get a different background if you're going to keep the white comic borders, they don't work together at all - preferrably, one that doesn't look like it's from a Geocities page circa 1998.
I'm definitely not taking that as jackassery, and appreciate the feedback. I'll take the advice and explain the reason for some of the points criticised
- Smaller logo: Agreed on that one. Next website-tweaking session (at the moment, the priority is on releasing the next page this week), I'll shrink it.
- Flashy IRC link: I forgot to stop the flashing. It's a habit for me to make links to new features blink or otherwise attract attention, and the IRC has been there for long enough for my few regulars to have noticed it. A few new readers entered the room too, it was nice to get to chat with them live, sort of.
- Bookmarking site links: Maybe I should make them smaller, just thought giving my readers the possibility to link to the site on Digg and such would increase my potential exposure and possibly my reader base. I should definitely do something about those though, they
are too big.
- Twitter feed: The feed is actually much more about the comic than about myself. Even when mentioning I now understand Flash, because the link between this and a website is kind of obvious. Maybe I should put it on the right-hand column site under the "quick cast reminder".
- Navbar over the comic: True, this is kind of redundant considering there's one under the comic.
- Quote: The quote actually changes every time you reload the page.
So! What would you think about this layout instead?