Hello.
If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed that the site has undergone a bit of a change. That’s because after roughly seven years of a standard webcomic design, I finally decided to update things and fix up the site. When I started the site, it was originally meant as a place to post the pages of Secrets & Shadows (hence the name of the website). I had no real plan other than put the comic online and be done with it. It had been something I’d mainly wanted to share with my Dad and when he died, a lot of my enthusiasm for it went with it. So I made this site as a way to get it out where people could read it because the team had worked hard on it.
Of course, I ended up continuing to make comics and posting some of them here as well as using this site to promote myself. But I never really had a plan for this site other than a place to dump finished pages for comics that might not see print (though they all eventually did). Because of this, I never really put any real effort or thought into the look of the site. It just kept the same thrown together design it had when I first put it together.
As time went on, I ended up moving away from the site. I shifted over to promoting myself more heavily on Facebook and Twitter before shifting again to a weekly email/newsletter. During that time, this website languished and figuratively collected dust. For three years, itwent untouched and un-updated.
Until now.
Last year, I just found myself kind of burnt out with social media. It can be great to be where all the people are, but it’s also nice to have a space to yourself. And then I remembered that I had my own space. So here I am.
When I logged in, I really looked at the site and knew that something had to change. The original layout was fine for when I was starting out, but it hadn’t aged well. It was hard to read the posts and the color scheme was too much. So I made the decision to switch the theme from a webcomic focused one to a more conventional one. I went back and forth on this many times, but I ultimately came to the decision to remove the comic aspect because all of the comics posted here were now available elsewhere. That wasn’t the case when I started out, but you can find my stuff across several different sites like Gumroad and Storenvy.
After considering making some announcement or easing into things, I decided that it would be better to rip the band-aid off and just do it. And here we are. It’s a cleaner look, more easy to read posts, streamlined, and easy to navigate. It’s a marked improvement in my opinion and I hope that you agree.
I can’t promise that I’ll making daily updates or anything like that, but I do plan to ease into posting on here more frequently and move a little bit away from being social media focused. So be on the lookout for posts and updates.
That’s all for now.
- Jon Parrish