Newbie Spellweaver
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2016
- Messages
- 36
- Reaction score
- 7
Nice overview! This would be even more useful if you could identify good/bad portals and show screenshots of those.
I agree with @Linkerzz, a portal should be very lightweight, and should load instantaneously. Consider hosting your portals on a static site host, such as Github pages, surge.sh, etc., so that your portal is up 24/7, regardless of the status of your game website (which is dependent on MySQL).
This is a well written tutorial, thank you.
My opinions for a good web portal:
-Lightweight. Doesn't take forever to load nor force users to wait.
-Might have a small skip button at the bottom for returning users.
-Animations are unnecessary, they can be a nice touch but no huge .swf/gif files please.
-Don't autoplay YouTube videos or spam music, give your user the choice.. (The first 2 seconds of any MMV can get really annoying after hearing it start automatically every visit).
Thanks!
I thought about doing that, but I rather not call out any particular server either way. I tried to explain enough so that they could be identified on their own. Though if anyone has any follow up questions, I'm more than happy to give my input.
I really like the idea of hosting the portal on a separate static site, and in theory it would be amazing for the portal to load instantaneously. The only problem is that sometimes slower connections may have a hard time downloading larger images, etc (in the case of Intrinsic's portal).
I definitely think loading effects should be done away with. If a portal has a loading bar, or 0% -> 100% counter, I'm out within 3 seconds. A user shouldn't have to wait around.
All very great suggestions as well!
On account of the auto play, I personally use it do you find it severely negates from the experience or just a personal preference?
Your portal could certainly load much much faster. It is currently fairly heavy, weighing in at around ~4mb without the Youtube video, and much higher with the autoplaying video. This is sort of ridiculous for a portal page, which as you said, should load very quickly. In fact, your portal would take over 15 seconds to load all images on a 4G connection (4Mb/s down)! And to add to this, your portal isn't mobile friendly.
You need to compress your images. Even if you use lossless compression (no noticeable quality loss), you will be reducing your portal size dramatically. If you use a lossy compression, you will save even more.
In my opinion, speed is everything with portals. Studies have shown (no links right now, sorry!) that users hate waiting for pages/apps to load, and the faster we can make our apps, the more click throughs we'll get.
Just something to think about!
Isn't it a bit ironic for you to make a guide on how to make a portal, when yours is basically (in my opinion) a ripoff of dawnveil? (albeit theirs is (was) nicer).
For reference,
dawnveil:You must be registered to see links
intrinsic:You must be registered to see links
I pay fairly little attention to maplestory servers in general, but your portal caught my eye when I immediately thought of dawnveil's. I can't see where my bias would come from, I'm in no way associated with either server, nor do I care for post-big bang servers, my first impression of your portal was just honestly that it looks like a ripoff of dawnveil. In my opinion it's better to have a unique website, and seeing as you're saying "here we go again" i suppose I'm not the first to spot the similarities.Oh boy, here we go again.
The main factor that is similar is the layout of the images. This is done by using a free to use and open source plugin calledYou must be registered to see links.
This plugin is not owned, licensed, etc. by Dawnviel or the person who they hired to make their site.
Any other similarities are purely coincidental and based most likely off your biased opinion. Feel free to look "under the hood".
Furthermore, unrelated to whatever you may think is 'ripped', does not negate the fact that my thread has legitimate points.
I pay fairly little attention to websites/maplestory servers in general, but your portal caught my eye when I immediately thought of dawnveil's. I can't see where my bias would come from, I'm in no way associated with either server, nor do I care for post-gms servers, my first impression of your portal was just honestly that it looks like a ripoff of dawnveil. In my opinion it's better to have a unique website, and seeing as you're saying "here we go again" i suppose I'm not the first to spot the similarities.
I do agree with the last part, in fact I think you could improve your portal by following some of your own advice (ie. "Over cluttering the page with unnecessary images, videos").
do you find it severely negates from the experience or just a personal preference?