Is it worth it to upgrade my weebly site?

[StevenDacasin]

I use Weebly as another host for my comic but its only the free version of the site. I want to upgrade the site but with the small amount of followers i have on Tapastic is it worth paying for a domain name?

[Wolven_Sister]

Ultimately it's up to you, but I think it depends on which you're gonna advertise more. Are you gonna promote your Tapastic profile more or your website more? If it's the former, I wouldn't worry about getting a domain right away. For example, I advertise my Tap page more (mainly due to ad rev) so I don't purchase a domain name for my comic's tumblr account.

But some people purchase a domain name right away to prevent someone stealing their name so that when said comic gets famous they'll have to pay that person thousands of dollars to buy the domain name.

[Kayke]

I think it could be worth it, but it depends on how customizable weebly is? I'm not really familiar with weebly, but just looking at your site really quick it doesn't feel like it was made for webcomics. It's a little bit difficult to navigate and the main page does not show any of your work other than the little header image.

You should browse through some other comic websites to get a feel for them and if Weebly isn't able to host a professional looking webcomic site, then maybe consider switching to a different host if you're going to start paying for a service.

For instance, Monsterkind has a beautiful site which I'm pretty sure is created in Wordpress/Comicpress (which is also what I use for my main site and I love it) and Ghoulfriends has a Tumblr with a custom URL which also looks nice. Notice how both of them give you comic pages as soon as you get to the site and also how the sites feel like they are part of the comic or at least are speaking the same design language.

I hope that helps you with your decision some.

[kambreapratt]

I agree that it depends on what you want to do with it. We have a main site and our mirror on Tapastic. We put most of our efforts for advertising,, blogging, etc into our main site and we focus on different things here. I have noticed that your audience will tend to stay where you find them, so people who follow the main site tend to go there and people on Tapastic tend to stay here.

If you are going to focus more of your efforts here you probably don't need to have a website, but I still would recommend keeping one in case you would change your mind down the road, and as someone mentioned, your domain name could be taken then.

If you do your own site, I agree that Wordpress/Comicpress is a good way to go. We use them on our main site and we have had very few problems.

[StevenDacasin]

I was thinking along the lines of just in case Tapastic closes down i feel it would be worth it to have a domain name. I also like the idea preventing someone from stealing my name.

[StevenDacasin]

Interesting wordpress seems really good looking at MonsterKind i might give it a try. I don't know yet about paying for the domain yet though.