A place to host your portfolio and a new community

[TorQueMoD]

Hey all!

I registered the domain http://www.hl2list.com/ a few years back with the intention of creating a sort of review site for HL2 maps but never had the time for it. I've now decided to create a new website/community for level designers (of all engines) to have their portfolio hosted and to participate in community Projects and competitions like they do over on polycount.

Right now the website is still in the alpha stage, but I'm trying to find designers who might want to add their works to the list. Take a look at the site, and if you think you'd like somewhere to post your portfolio and you'd like to be a part of the HL2 List community, please send in an application.

[Minos]

Nice idea, I'll add my maps later =)

[TorQueMoD]

You've got some beautiful work there Minotauro, I'd love to add your work to the list. All you need to do is fill out the application and provide me with some links to some zip files so I can take a look at them in game.

[ShaDoW]

I always like the idea behind such websites. With the tutorials, spotlight and member portfolios it reminds me a lot of Interlopers.net.

Have you thought about the future and scalability of your website? Right now everything is created with iframes and tables in plain HTML pages that have their entire CSS structure in them each time. I can see this working for a simple website of a few pages, but if you want your website to grow with new content added (daily, weekly?) you will probably run into so many problems and headaches. It could be a good idea to give this some thought before going further with the website?

It would also be a good idea to look at the information you release about your members. Mr. Happy's page for example has his email written right out in the open. Of course, I don't know if he wanted it this way or not. However, will all future members be happy with this? A good idea would be to look into image based solutions, or simply formulating the email addresses in a different way to prevent their email addresses from being picked up by additional spam.

Good luck!

[TorQueMoD]

Thanks for the advice Shadow. An image based way to e-mail would be a great idea. I honestly wasn't thinking because I was up late putting everything together.

As far as functionality of the site, I have no problem re-creating it in the future if it expands. For now, the current format works well enough but again thank you for your suggestions.

[Fergo]

Nice idea!

One suggestion to the layout: reduce the height of the header (title+menu+pics). I think it's taking too much space (on my notebook, the content of the page starts past beyond the middle of the screen area). In larger monitors it's probably not an issue, but would be nice to consider this for smaller screen sizes such as 15.4" notebooks (1280x800). One simple solution might be just to remove the frame and put everything in a single page, like most websites.

Fergo

[TorQueMoD]

I'm debating on removing the frame from the site. I think I most likely will as it makes the site place better in search engines anyway.

Thanks for pointing that out though. I work on a 22" screen so its a lot harder to guess as to how things will look on smaller screens.

[Psy]

If you'd like I'd be happy to help you with any HTML or CSS coding.

[TorQueMoD]

Thanks for the offer. Send me an e-mail to torque_mod@surrogateinteractive.com and we can talk more. I think I've got most of the coding down, but its always nice to get help. I'm more of a garphic designer than a programmer.