Speaking of DMFA, she's planning an upgrade herself. I've been anxious for an upgrade since, oh... September. It's just that now that I'm out of school for a little while that I've had the time for it.

Part of the thing is that I don't feel the site is currently working -- over half the people who come to the site seem to "bounce off" and in the absence of better data, don't come back. (If they do, they're not showing up more than once a month...) This has remained unchanged for the better part of a year, in spite of an increase in readers and various improvements on the comic itself. In order to increase readership, I can either continue to spend $80+ a pop trying to gain readers through convention appearances (the majority of whom have a 50/50 chance of bouncing off the site), or I can upgrade the site and try to retain more of the traffic that's already coming to me.

I may be misinterpreting the numbers and not realize that in fact these "bounces" are more dedicated folk than I'm aware of, but at this point I only receive so much feedback from folks like yourself that I don't have any good reason not to trust the numbers.

My current site layout actually IS quite similar to that used by DMFA... which is part of the problem, as I can attest to by having to find all sorts of interesting solutions on the weekends I work at conventions. Wordpress would at least give me the option of automating the updates on those weekends, so I don't have to scramble to find an internet connection at a hotel or get a ride all the way back to my dorm room just to update. With my usual penchant for buffers, this also means I no longer drop whatever I'm doing around 10PM or so to update the site, which saves me further time/money and a lot of unnecessary stress. (That ALONE is probably worth the site upgrade!)

Also, this would be a design that I can maintain by myself as opposed to depending on someone else to do it for me... which also hopefully means I can more readily alter parts of the site to make them more useful later on.

I want to make the site more accessible to new readers as well as dedicated fans, and I also want to alter it so people can comment and interact right on the site itself as opposed to going to the forums (and having to pick out a new account, and go to the right subforum, and, and, and...). As a bonus, using Wordpress with ComicPress will unify the blog / comic so I don't have to update both of them one after the other, further streamlining the update process.

TL;DR: It makes things far easier for me AND hopefully it'll also bring in more readers so I can continue making the comic. Even if it doesn't, I'll have significantly more control over the website than I do now so I can just tweak it until it works.

My current hosting is through Xepher, hence why they both work. I prefer the http://lastres0rt.com URL for branding, obviously. (I also have http://www.last-resort.net thanks to a friend)

It's more than just "changing the design of the site"; obviously there are the updating advantages I mentioned, but also in doing this I'm hoping it gives the site more utility to both readers and myself (plus more flexibility in adding / altering new content). Besides, Wordpress offers lots of little utilities like being able to take comments on the comic's pages themselves (which I'm hoping will spur more/better feedback than making them go to the forums), among other things.

As for asking for feedback... Just because I have a good idea which platform to use doesn't mean I necessarily know what to put in it. >_> The current design feels rather disjointed / simplistic to me, and I'd like to fix that obviously; but also I want to improve the general branding of the site. I want it to have an actual "feel" to it that I think the current site lacks.

Yes, content is a key factor in the site, but the redesign has me convinced that there's more to it than that which needs fixin'. Or rather, I need to fix it at least enough that people are willing to see the rest of the content on the site; the whole "They're bouncing off without reading anything else" aspect seems to indicate that people aren't exactly giving the rest of the content a chance.

I actually adore the site. >_>;

So do I, but I also am trying to improve upon it before FWA / MomoCon rolls around. Unfortunately, the way the site currently is, I can only do so much to it as far as improvements go before I need a whole new overhaul like this, and it's better done now before I have too many more pages to add.