Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part Two — Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website

Website Builders

A cartoonist or animator who hopes to make a living by posting his or her own cartoons on the internet will probably need to have a website custom built to meet the needs of being an ongoing entertainment website. These needs include frequent updates, plus an accessible archive of prior works, plus a section to either operate or introduce a compelling link to a retail business, plus interactive spaces for fans to comment on each cartoon and for you to reply. Initially a blog might work okay, but from what I hear from people who have blogs, there are so many different restrictions, both on subject and on volume of material, that it is probably better in the long run to just establish a website so that the cartoonist has more control over his or her content. So, how does an artist get a website built, and get it running on the internet, if said artist isn’t also such a computer expert that he can just build his own website? In my case, I figured that I should just pay an expert to build a website for me.

I’m going to relate here my own experiences in attempting to get my Viagri cartoon website built, as that should illustrate well the pitfalls for others to avoid, as well as how to sort through the various options that one will encounter. Since I live in Los Angeles, I expected there should be an abundance of people available locally that I could work with. I was wrong.

First I tried to network. I called three people in Los Angeles who have their own cartoon websites, to ask for recommendations. They all told me the same thing: They paid someone years ago to build their websites for them, and now they need to upgrade their websites, but the people they used have since either (a) died, (b) retired, or (c) changed careers and moved out of the state. They said they don’t know who to contact, and that if I find someone reliable, please let them know. So then I did a Google search for “website designers”, but found endless listings for graphic designers. I felt that was one area I could handle myself, partly by looking at several other websites for good examples and making notes on what I liked best in each case. What I needed was somebody to actually build my website. So then I did a Google search for “website builders”, but only found listings for build-it-yourself templates. I have no confidence that I’m going to be able to build a website myself without a million missteps and glitches. Finally a friend of a friend of a friend, on the east coast, told me the secret words to type into a Google search: “Website programmers for hire”. I did that and up came the names of literally one and a half million websites of people or companies that build websites — most of them in India. I then tried to narrow my search by typing in “Website programmers for hire, Los Angeles”. This resulted in a list of 200,000 websites that build websites for clients located in Los Angeles, while the websites themselves are located everywhere from Seattle to India.