Alright, I'm going to get started on building this. One issue I'm seeing right away is that there seem to be a lot of sites that do something like this already.
Does what we're building here seem like it'll get much use? It's going to cost a few thousand dollars to build this site, so we'll need a pretty strong answer to the "why" question in addition to the "how" that we've been tackling so far.
What I like about cgtuts+ that I don't see on your layout is a mini description of what the tutorial is that I'm clicking on. I like that on cgtuts+ because I can decide if I want to click through the tutorial or not which saves me waiting for a page to load. With your design from the last couple of shots looks like i have to click through to read the description.
I think if you build something that you feel is going to be a cut above the rest, then yeah it'll get use.
You obviously want to get it right and from what you've shown it looks like something I would use if looking for a specific tutorial.
All of my experience comes from programming, but based on the best tutorial sites I have been to, they all have one thing in common, which is their strength, but after a time its also their weakness.
They have great simple tutorials that teach a single concept, and do it well. But the thing I see people mess up all the time is that they can reproduce the concept, but cannot integrate it with others due to the very different and often incompatible styles. I think a great tutorial site will need to teach both single concepts, and their real world integration.
@Valoo: I'm trying to understand what you mean, but some clarification would help. You're saying that it's a good idea to have a lot of small and concentrated tutorials (i.e. "understanding the performance of indoor volumetric lighting") but at the same time, some structure to help people connect that to, say, outdoor lighting concepts would help?
@Sean: Glad to get your thumbs up. Right now I'm running a /huge/ batch process for uploading the existing library of tutorials to the site so we can start looking at live data. Over 820 resources! I'll check back when that's all done. For now, it's time for some TF2. God bless multi-core processors.
Hmm...I'm kind of hitting a low point in morale at the moment. I'm seeing that the original 3dCodex site isn't getting much use, and I'm concerned that this new one is going to take a lot of effort and not yield much in the way of user benefit. Might shelf this again and put the time toward some of the other stuff I've got going on right now...
Replies
Does what we're building here seem like it'll get much use? It's going to cost a few thousand dollars to build this site, so we'll need a pretty strong answer to the "why" question in addition to the "how" that we've been tackling so far.
I think if you build something that you feel is going to be a cut above the rest, then yeah it'll get use.
You obviously want to get it right and from what you've shown it looks like something I would use if looking for a specific tutorial.
Good luck with it
http://www.OrangeStrype.com
Still working out the kinks so this is just a private staging server.
They have great simple tutorials that teach a single concept, and do it well. But the thing I see people mess up all the time is that they can reproduce the concept, but cannot integrate it with others due to the very different and often incompatible styles. I think a great tutorial site will need to teach both single concepts, and their real world integration.
@Sean: Glad to get your thumbs up. Right now I'm running a /huge/ batch process for uploading the existing library of tutorials to the site so we can start looking at live data. Over 820 resources! I'll check back when that's all done. For now, it's time for some TF2. God bless multi-core processors.