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Saturday
Jul202013

Saturday Archive Dive: Disadvantages to Sole Proprietorship

Today's dive into the deep archive of Webcomics.com takes us to July 13, 2011, when we discussed two of themajor disadvantages to identifying as a sole proprietorship.

As small businesspeople (or, more flatteringly, people who manage small businesses) most of us fall into the legal category of a sole proprietor. And, for most of us, the sole proprietorship is the easiest and most advantageous structure for our businesses to be run under. After all, we're not generating the income or taking the risks that would cause us to structure our businesses as LLCs or corporations.

However, as our businesses grow and the revenue grows to a more significant size -- not to mention the Intellectual Property (IP) being amassed, it becomes increasingly important to be aware of the two major drawbacks of the sole proprietorship.

Read the entire post and comment there.

Friday
Jul192013

Friday Archive Dive: The Danger of Coloring on the Edge

Today's Archive Dive is from July 19, 2012, and it's a guest post by Mary Cagle in which she shares a greattutorial on the coloring process.

Something that drives me crazy about a lot of cel shading is that the artist only lines the edge of their figures with shadow.

As a demonstration, here's a recent panel of my comic shaded in such a way:

While cel shading is about simplifying forms and quickly adding depth to an image, doing it in this way completely ruins the point of shading.

Read the entire post and comment there.

Thursday
Jul182013

Ad placement

When I was forced to change Content Management Systems recently, I had the opportunity to give my existing Web design a couple of tweaks. And one of the most important ones was ad placement.

Google has a much-passed-around "heat map" of site content.

 

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Wednesday
Jul172013

Katie Lane: The "Work Made For Hire" blog

There's a new site you're going to want to bookmark. Work Made For Hire is the Web presence of Katie Lane, a lawyer who specializes in comic artists and other creative professionals. From the site:

Katie Lane is a nerd.

She’s also an attorney, obsessed with negotiation, a former actress, a current writer, and a forever student. She is passionate about helping other people learn how to negotiate because someone once told her she couldn’t do it. They were wrong.

Katie graduated from law school long enough ago that there was a reunion and she missed it.  She’s advised librarians, comedians, ruffians and a gentleman with some very passionate ideas about revolutionizing televised sport fishing on all matter of legal conundrums.

By day, Katie negotiates for a large company.  At night she transforms into a business counselor to comic artists, authors, designers and vaudeville programs across the country.  She does this because if she ever has children, she wants them to be able to laugh at something other than her.

She provides legal services and private negotiation coaching and teaches negotiation seminars. She would gladly entertain your generally applicable and interesting questions.  You can contact her here.

Katie lives in Portland, Oregon, with her lovely and talented wife Dylan, and a ridiculous number of animals.

You'll know her wife, Dylan, as the new co-writer of PvP. So it's pretty safe to say Kate underdstands the needs of webcartoonists...

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Tuesday
Jul162013

How To Create a Child Theme in WordPress

As we mentioned in last week's Ten Tips for WordPress newbs piece, you never want to make changes to your WordPress theme. Instead create a Child Theme and makle changes to that.

It works like this. The site uses all of the coding from the theme except for the coding found in the Child Theme. The Child Theme is a selective over-writing of the original theme.

Anything you do to change your site through the original theme will be lost the next time the theme developers release an update.

Here's how to create a Child Theme...

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