Website I've been working on

[Andy]

CompSci.Ca! It's your watdotcolor warrior, and I need your help!

I've been working on a manga site with two of my friends in my spare time

http://www.9panels.com

The site is almost functional and I want to get some feedback on it.

All the code is written by us, andnone of us have any experience in making websites.

Any advice/feedback would be appreciated!

Btw.. wtf happened to my millions and millions of bits?

[saltpro15]

wow, looks pretty good Andy!

[DtY]

Make sure it will validate: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.9panels.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

Interesting error, I often use uppercase, and can't remember it getting a validator error, it makes sense for them to be uppercase though, that's the HTTP method, and they are sent uppercase,

[Andy]

Thanks DtY! i fixed the front page, and will work on the rest of the pages =D

[DtY]

Okay, gave it a proper look over this time (didn't have time earlier), I really like that flash viewer, much slicker than onemanga (which is the only website I know of to compare that to), preloading is nice. Also looks like it's going to have better content (user submitted indie comics).
I don't know how you'll feel about this, but a download a zip of chapter (cbz) would be cool, I still prefer qcomicbook to an online reader, that way I can use it even when internet occasionally goes out. (Course, this could be a potential hit to the site, people wouldn't have to visit as often).

Looking over the flash viewer, I think maybe loading up to five pages before and after the current page is enough, there's no need to download the whole chapter each time you look. (On the other hand, you don't want to have to wait while the page you want to view loads)

[Tony]

looks good Andy! I've started following your site's twitter feed, and will check it out some more later on.

[Andy]

DtY, we'll be wrapping up our viewer in an Adobe AIR app, and distributing it with the comics. Its one of the things we have planned in the near future!

As to preloading only 5 pictures, we had something similar before, and had some users complain so we decided to preload all images. I know its possibly inefficient in terms of bandwidth, but stats show that an overwhelming majority of users finishing a chapter once they begin reading.

Thanks tony! We've tried promoting to Ctrl+A (Club that really likes Anime) at University of Waterloo, but they seem to be hesitant to support us due to past legal issues even though we are fully compliant with DMCA