It’s been too long since we’ve simply posted some news, of any kind. This isn’t going to be incredibly interesting, though. Just an update on our beta of the new site design and some other projects that have been in the works since the dawn of time. Or at least it feels that way. This weekend I inadvertently ended up with a four day weekend, what with the Jesus oriented holiday tomorrow, and a reduction in hours at my full time gig. Logistics of the long weekend aside, instead of attempting to cobble funds together for a sunny vacation or anything of that sort, I’ll be sitting down at my desk for the majority of the weekend to accomplish a list of tasks I have outlined for myself. The site may or may not go down for intermittent periods, but fear not – it won’t be for long periods of time.

The first and foremost will be taking our current ‘beta release’ of the new site design to a fully and functioning ‘complete’ status. There’s really not too much left to do, as the subsequent pages are all relatively easy to style once I’ve finished mucking about with the front page, which is generally in a functional state. I’m still experiencing some cross browser compatibility issues, which is always the bane of my web design experience, and the one factor that probably keeps me from doing it full time. Damn you, W3C Standards and the lack of adherents in the major browsers. Damn you.

The second is getting our cast page in order. We’ve been running without a cast page for almost a year now, as my youngest brother (the inspiration for ‘Clark’) reminds me on a near weekly basis. The reason for that is a myriad of reasons. The first has been that I didn’t want to just create a character page that simply had a headshot and a character description. Because of that, I’ve started creating a couple of desktop sized images that highlight each of the characters in a light that we feel reflects their role in the twice-weekly drama that unfolds here. However, up until now, I’ve lacked a machine that’s had the computing power to create images on that scale, nor have I had the time. I do have both of those things as of last week though.

The second reason is related to the ‘desktop’ sized images I’ve been working on. I love making desktops, and wanted to create some more content for our readership to enjoy, so the end goal is to have downloadable desktops for you guys. However, because No Reason is funded by what little disposable income we have, we’ve wanted to establish a store front for some time so that we can follow Danielle Corsetto’s example and hope that in exchange for some colorful additions to your computer, the readership (you) might be entreated to help us out by donating a few dollars for each of these offerings – not just for No Reason, but for The Watchtower Podcast and for my own design site which is a work in progress and another story entirely. We wanted a place where we could efficiently and easily offer you downloadables for donations, digital copies of comic books we print for reduced prices, and other merchandise. With the help of a plugin I was previously unaware of, we finally have a way to do that.

We previously had used Cafe Press, and after having seen the quality of the merchandise they produce, we pulled that store. We wanted more control over the quality of our products, and doing it ourselves would allow us to do that (and we’ve had better stuff produced by local printers, so it works out). We had also tried to do it ourselves simply using Paypal, but one of the biggest hurdles we ran into was ’shipping’ costs – Paypal designed a system that shows very little understanding of how packages are shipped, as the only way to establish shipping costs was based on price, not on destination. Which is stupid. A $5 dollar comic shipping to Canada costs less than $5 comic shipping to the UK (sorry International people, them’s the breaks).

So, for those that are interested in taking a look, the rough build has already begun, and will hopefully be functional by next week. So – here’s the to-do list of what I’ll be working on this weekend:

• Complete No Reason Comics Site Design
• Finish Cast Page – with desktops
• Finish Store Site

Wish me luck!

P.S. A huge thanks to Sohmer for the linkage (and to Lar as well for the cameo)!