Calvin & Hobbes Online Archive

Final Site – http://www.calvinandhobbesarchive.com

PROPOSAL

Thinking about what I wanted to do for my final project I had in mind two objectives. One – I wanted to work on a concept that I could really delve into and put a lot of time and effort into since it is taking up the remainder of the semester. And two – I really hoped that in some way I could make some actual income off of this and have a nice piece to put in my portfolio. Keeping in mind that I would be working on this for the rest of the semester, I turned to my hobbies and interests. After knocking out a few ideas and putting aside some others I came up with the idea to create an online archive of every Calvin & Hobbes comic ever made. Calvin & Hobbes is a large part of my childhood and still remains my favorite comic strip out there. I think it would be nice to be able to view all of these comics online in an organized manner.

No website out there (Or at least that I could find) hosts all of the comics in an easy to view manner without any restrictions. There are a couple sites that have daily comic strips that are chosen and posted to the site so that users can come to the site and view one new strip per day, just like it would have been in the newspaper. Thinking deeper about this, I do believe it would be nice to have a feature on the home page of my site that updates everyday with the next comic in the series. This would not be the main purpose though. The reason for having this website live is to provide a place for all of the Calvin & Hobbes comics for anybody to view at any time. I was also thinking about having a file available for download hat contains the entire archive so that people can have the files on their local sites.

I also have thought about including options to “like” and post certain strips to social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and reddit. But, I would not want these options to follow every strip. I would like the whole reading experience to have a certain flow to it. So if readers want to read the entire series without anything distracting them, they can. This will be tough though, considering that I would also like to make a little cash on the side for this project. I could go about this a couple ways, so I plan on putting some ads throughout the site on the main pages with my Google AdSense account and also a small widget for PayPal donations. I know I have to be careful through, because misplaced ads can be a big turn-off for sites like this. And in order to make money off the ads, I have to draw a large amount of traffic, so user interface and satisfactions are a must.