Good friend and talented graphic artist, Meg Gandy, was already using WordPress to share her web comic Godsend. The comic is incredible, but the WordPress theme was unwieldy for publishing and comment moderation and clumsy for her avid readers.

We knew WordPress could be a great fit, but not seeing any top-notch examples of a clean, elegant, and responsive web comic theme, we decided to build one from the bottom up. Besides, Meg already had over 180 pages published, most with a significant amount of comments and discussion from her readers. We didn’t want to fundamentally change their experience or lose the years of interaction by switching platforms.

Our final design treats the comic reading as the highest priority for both desktop and mobile readers, balancing it with Meg’s need to occasionally post announcements about her progress and convention appearances. We also cleaned up the commenting and moderation system, improved the navigation experience from page to page, and set up redirects for outdated links from the old site to match their respective pages on the new site, keeping all of the content’s search engine rankings in place.

We’re looking forward to watching Meg crank out additional beautiful pages for this comic now that she’s got a stress free WordPress theme to rely on. We’re also looking forward to watching her readership grow as the comic is much easier to find, consume and share.

Visit the new site at godsend.shatterlands.com and fall in love with Meg’s art and Jesse’s writing. And then head on over to Meg’s Patreon and support her work.