A few days before Christmas 2021 ElfQuest co-creator and website admin Richard Pini decided that enough was enough. While ElfQuest.com was still functional and being used for frequent news posts, the design itself had grown unwieldy, with new pages layered up like barnacles on a pier. He put in a call to a local web design company: Could they do a complete makeover, keep the best existing content, and provide for new features that would look as if they’d been part of the plan all along?
Fifteen months later, the answer is a very satisfied “yes.” This is the 4th (or perhaps 5th – there have been incremental tweaks from time to time) incarnation of the first domain devoted to a single comic book series. The very first EQ site went live in 1994. (Marvel and DC had put comics online earlier, but they used gateways such as AOL.) Over the intervening nearly thirty years, advances in the software tools used in web design evolved — from HTML to PHP to more user-friendly aids like WordPress — and ElfQuest’s online presence changed to keep up with the times.
For this newest, sleekest version, the underlying framework has once-again been redesigned to take advantage of a powerful WordPress add-on: Elementor. It is a complex but ultimately very graphically intuitive tool, and it makes possible such supercharged improvements such as the new ElfQuest FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page — the previous one was simply a very long list of questions that needed much scrolling to get through. The new version is a pop-down “accordion” that gives the user access to every section at the top of the page.
In addition, the new ElfQuest site, while retaining much earlier, evergreen content, has added — and will continue to add — new features such as new or rarely-seen art and behind-the-scenes material, and new commentary from ElfQuest creators Wendy and Richard Pini, and other EQ contributors past and present.
