Welcome to the new jsnsmith.com

For the very first post on my new blog, I thought it would be a great idea to welcome everyone to the newly redesign jsnsmith.com.

This face lift has been a long time coming – a couple of years at least! – and I’m happy that it’s finally in place. The last version of the site managed to last about five years, so tearing it down and building it up again has been a little bittersweet. All in all, the redesign and rebuild has taken about 6 months (and most of that was in the planning and copy writing stage). This has been more than cosmetic and there are a couple of big changes to the site:

1. The biggest change is that the site is now responsive. I’ve wanted to implement this change but have held off because it was better to focus my attention on other projects. So it’s nice to finally get a chance to implement this and really bring the site up-to-date.
2. On a surface level, you’ll notice some refreshed branding and graphics. It’s nothing major, but as I’ve been working through building the site, it became apparent that new graphics were much needed and so that became a major focus for the last part of the process. I’ve also rolled these new brand graphics out to my Twitter and Facebook page in case you want to check those out as well.
3. The other major change you might notice is that I’ve dropped “artist” from my main branding and have included “comics”. As a lot of you know, over the past several years, I’ve done more and more comics work but you’d never know that from this site! So as I’ve neared the end of my work on ON THE VERGE: THE ARROW OF TIME*, I’ve started planning what to do next and it made sense to really try to utilize this site for whatever that happens to be (sorry, no spoilers!).

It’s funny, back when I was starting work on my On the Verge Project, the conventional wisdom among people who had their own webcomic, was that you should go out and get your own webspace and domain name so that people can easily find your comic. Well at the time, I wasn’t too sure how the whole thing was going to go or how long I’d continue. So spending money on webspace and a domain name seemed a bit much and I just built a little site on the back of my existing jsnsmith.com webspace. Well fast forward to now and as I’m wrapping up work on THE ARROW OF TIME, and considering my next project (which will be something different), it seems like an ideal time to sit down and rework this site and build in some new content – like comics – and then really utilize jsnsmith.com for all my new projects.

And there are new projects coming!

For anyone who has been following my On the Verge Project for the past 5-and-a-bit years, not to worry. The plan is to definitely keep the On the Verge site going “as is” for the foreseeable future. We still have quite a bit before the end of THE ARROW OF TIME and then I’ve got lots of other stories to tell after that finishes off. That being said, the On the Verge site was always intended for On the Verge only. So when I started working on other comics projects like THE SISTERS, ANDREW JACKSON IN SPACE and UNLAWFUL GOOD, it was a little bit weird to post that stuff there.

So one of the big things to point out is that I’ll continue to post On the Verge stuff to that site but I’ll also post links here on the main site as well. If you’ve just interested in On the Verge, then feel free to follow along like you always have. But if you like my work and/or my other comic work as well, then jsnsmith.com is probably the best place to keep up-to-date with everything that is going on.

I also plan on using the blog here on jsnsmith.com to really highlight some of the new work that I’ve been turning out over the past couple of years. I’ve been busy and updating the site with new stuff just wasn’t a priority. That being said, now that I’ve got a blog, I’m going to use it to show off some of the work that I’ve done. I’ll also dig through the many posts that I’ve put up over on the On the Verge site and see if there isn’t anything in there that can be re-purposed if it’s still relevant.

And that’s about it. Take a look around and let me know what you think either through the comments below or via Twitter or the Facebook page.

One final point: I have quite a few social media channels, but the best way to stay in touch right now is probably my Facebook page. I’ll be posting some exclusive content just to Facebook and absolutely everything from this site and On the Verge will be posted there too. If you haven’t had a chance to “like” the page, please check it out, follow along and say hi!

Thanks for stopping by and be sure to come back and check us out soon.

———-

*On the Verge is my “original graphic novel” that I’ve been working on and posting online as a weekly webcomic. New pages go up every Tuesday afternoon.