Web Tweaks 2026

Yesterday, on April 17, I deployed the re-designed and updated the WCG Comics website!

When it comes to my website, I am an inveterate tinkerer. Though not an expert by any means, I enjoy the process of building and coding web pages. In 1998, I started with html, moved to CSS in 2009, and Wordpress in 2022. These updates have included re-designs, moving to different web hosts, and migrating from PayPal to WooCommerce and Square as my payment processor.

While my website has always met my needs functionally—the main goal being the ability to make the purchase process at my webstore as smooth and painless as possible for users—a major goal in my bucket list has been to move to a more modern fluid and responsive full-width website design. Not only was my current website—using a template called MH Themes—somewhat outmoded because it was an older design, I did not have access to some recent Wordpress features.

Above: Recently retired WCG Comics website.

Over the past several months, I intermittently experimented and played with a variety of designs and themes. None seemed to adequately meet my needs—existing templates seemed too rigid and unsuited for what I wanted.

I realized that another daunting aspect of a potential re-design would be the need to re-create and migrate all my existing sales and products, images, and other features I’d incorporated over the years. Indeed, it was enough to make me believe that such a re-design was unfeasible and daunting to rebuild the website again from the ground up.

A major breakthrough was coming across the Staging feature in Wordpress, that allows a user to duplicate an existing website into a walled off sandbox and play with it without risk of breaking the original site. Just as importantly, when it’s ready, staging also allows you to deploy the website by simply writing over and replacing the existing website to make the new site live.

I also came across a theme that I thought might work for me—NewSpare by AF Themes. Though similar to the MH Magazine theme in that it’s a news site at its heart, it had a full-width design with a top banner image that gave me access to more modern features. While I still had to re-build (or rather, re-create) the front page from scratch, and ensure the webstore pages worked properly, the rest of my content otherwise transferred fairly smoothly into the new format. I still need to slightly tweak the containers of the other pages to ensure they do not run to the very edge, but fortunately, these are mostly cosmetic changes since the pages otherwise retained their layout and content, and were already fully functional and readable. Because of all this, what I thought might take me months was completed over a a few nights!

While I’ve learned to never say never when it comes to my website, hopefully this recent leap will be the last major re-design or update to the website I’ll need to make for awhile!

Below: The website from May 2024.