After a long time without a gaming site I've finally found the time to setup a new one. The focus of this site is currenly the Empire Deluxe series and more specific the newest one EDEE, although older versions are planed to be covered.

If you are interested in this site, then you can visit the site at the following addres: http://www.salientgames.com.

If you have a comment about the site, then please let me know (here or on my own forums).

Down?

Not at the moment, did you get an error then?

No, it just didn't react.

Anyway, it seems to work now. I'll take a closer look at your site later tonight.

As you know, I strongly dislike these standard 'portal systems' which make every site on the net look the same, but since it's the contents which count, I'm curious to see what the future will bring

It's the effort in reprogramming the standard thing logon, forums, ... that I've done about 10 times that gets boring, and they are way betterat security then I am. That is the only reason that I use a portal system, I'm now looking into adding my own specific mods ... now that is interesting :-)

Well, as Mr Cresote mentioned, the layout isn't really striking; in my opinion a somewhat personal touch is missing. I like the colours, though.

A second point is that you have a lot of subcategories, which makes it difficult to find the content you are looking for. Do you really need "New Articles", "Popular Articles" and "Top Articles"? How about "Articles"?

Moreover, I'd completely name the games that the site deals with. "EDEE" and "EDIE" isn't very telling for beginners.

I'm not that a good of an artist so I'll be working on the layout once I get the hang of the system. Or add a couple of themes

The subcategories are currently not very full of content, but I have an archive of 500+ scenarios ... for ED, EDIE and EDEE ... oops at it again

Good point, I'll make a note of that and correct
the ED acronyms as I come accross them.

I haven't descided on the menu structure yet. I thought about remove the faq pages but I recieved a mail from a user that ... after reading the faq ... so I descided to leave them for now

Thanks for the comments, if you have any more, then please let me know.

Small comment after I browsed around a little more: It strikes me as somewhat annoying that it's basically impossible to do anything on the site without registering. For some contents, that might make sense, but why can't I even read the forum threads as a guest for example? It's of course your choice, but I always consider restrictions like that discouraging from becoming a regular as a visitor.

That should teach me to check my own website as a visitor next time. The forums should have been available for browsing in the first place. That has now been rectified.

Once again, thanks

Looks good and promising. Maybe a bit too "Empire"-focused? I don't know. But I expect very good content.

The things I would have to say, would only be about this MaxWebPortal itself, especially the technical implementation is awful.

Edited by dregenrocks at 14:21 on April, 28th 2005

What version are you talking about? MaxWebPortal 2 was rewritten (or so they claim).

Excuse my late answer.

I'm talking about version 2.0.

Let me list a few things, I consider as bad:

- Pervertion of the box-model. They use a lot of div-container in a div-container in a div-container in a div-container, only to use a table finally. This is not, what it's meant to be. every "box" should contain a (more or less) logical content-area.

- Use of "font"-tags, which do not exist (officially).

- Use of a Doctype, they don't care about: Validation-Result

I know. It "looks" good, but only thanks to the most advanced and complex software-pieces, after nuke- and weather simulation: The Browser-Quirks.

Sorry, but that's not quite correct. In HTML 4.01 Transitional (which is the declared doctype), font tags still exist, but they are classed 'decrepated'. See here.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 12:02 on May, 06th 2005

Okay, I withdraw that point from the list.

But that transitional, confusing mixture of HTML- and CSS-Attributes for design and even HTML-elements for design is not, what I consider modern web-developement.

Maybe I am also not a saint in this topic, but I don't create generic web-portals, too.

Edited by dregenrocks at 12:57 on May, 06th 2005

I consider generic 'portal' scripts the worst development on the Internet of the last few years for the reasons stated, but in this case, I can understand why it is this way: If you're developing something for as many people as possible to use, you can't go without compromises. In this case: There are millions of crap browsers in use. If you're just writing a site for yourself (and as long as it's not an already established one, because if it is, the old visitors will probably not understand the need for change if it was 'working' before), you can (and should) try yourself at great style at the cost of potential audience, of course.

If browsers were to repsect and handle CSS as the standard describes, most of these 'hacks' would not be needed.

The code is indeed a mess in someplaces, but if you remeber that this project has a history that is dragining along and this might well be the reason for some of the 'bad' code.

But since I was looking for an asp portal system that would provide an infastructer I sought a feature rich one and landed with MWP.

So maybe not the best ever written, but to my knowledge the best ASP portal system.

You don't need to justify the use of MaxWebPortal. It's their business to do correct, not yours. The things I mourn about, are mainly caused by lack of awarness and knowledge and it's the whole web-situation I refer to. Luckily it's getting (slowly) better by now.

Okay, I also don't like ASP, but this is a question of personal preferences...

No, that's an objectively correct view

I don't care about that either. My primary aim when writing code is that the site is working, and not to "validate" the code. No, this is not because of my own inability to write code that is 100% standard compliant (I could if I wanted); I just don't see the necessity to do it.