Cagle Cartoons has made some changes to its homepage and to functions at the site.
Daryl Cagle uses up a little bandwidth to talk about and explain the changes.
We’ve made some changes to the front page of our syndicate site,
CagleCartoons.com that will affect our contributing artists.
The CagleCartoons.com site is the core of our little business. This is where our subscription customers get their cartoons and columns; these are mostly daily, paid-circulation newspapers in the USA who put our content on their editorial pages. (If you only read our blog and Cagle.com you may want to read no further, as this doesn’t affect you. This may be a bit wonky for most readers.)
While Daryl thinks some may find it geeky, I found it informative.
With why they are changing the front page…
We’ve been addressing some nagging issues with how we deliver the cartoons on the site. Most editors only look for what is new on the front page of the site and don’t consider older cartoons in our vast database. Often (such as every Thursday) we had too many new cartoons for the front page and cartoons that were loaded early in the day were gone later in the day, pushed out by the newest contributions. Unless an editor visited twice a day, she wouldn’t see all of the new cartoons –and most editors don’t visit every day.
with statistics on the use of cartoons on the site…
In general, 20% of the cartoons get 80% of the reprints.
with recommendations for cartoonists on how to upload their work…
We encourage our cartoonists to submit black and white versions of their cartoons, because cartoons designed for black and white look better than color cartoons converted to grayscale where some colors come out too dark and cartoons often flatten to a dull gray … We encourage cartoonists to upload their cartoons in a higher resolution than the cartoonists prefer, and we encourage cartoonists to save their work in tiff format, which is not “lossy” like jpg and png formats. (Editors prefer jpg).
with their experience on the preferences of editors…
We love the world cartoonists, but American editors don’t, and these are the least downloaded cartoons by our newspaper subscribers –so we’ve pushed the WORLD CARTOONS down the page …
and their dealing with cartoonists:
Newspaper editors hate when cartoonists use dirty words, but many cartoonists love dirty words which are commonplace on the Web. We’re considering allowing cartoonists to do “dirty word versions” of their cartoons that would be available as variations since there is so much demand for that among the cartoonists.
It really is a fascinating read.
And…
More changes will be coming soon!
