Portal to Hyrule

We're looking for dedicated staff to help us out here at PTH. We
need several news writers to scour the internets for news, as well
as one or two people to periodically update the spotlight. We also
need people to write game related content. Walkthroughs, Heart
Container guides, etc. If you're interested in applying, click here!

DekuLinkCreator/Webmaster

Andrew created and runs Portal to Hyrule. All of PTH is coded
and designed by Deku. Other things he does around here
include writing content and hanging out on the forums. Andrew
loves video games, science, and technology.

MaedhrosForums Co-Admin

Matt is co-administrator of the forums and a Humanities
undergraduate. He lives near the mountains in Tennessee and
enjoys philosophy, fine literature, science, video games, and
offensive jokes.

It began in 2005. Amist the excitement of the then-upcoming Zelda title, I decided to create my own Zelda website. Inspired by ZHQ2 and their unparalleled news coverage of TP, I registered at Freewebs (Now known as webs) and thus, Fans of Zelda was born. To be completely honest, it shouldn’t even be considered a website. The main page served as a place for updates on my quest to get a domain name. It’s so shamefull (I was young), I’ve taken the “updates” off the original site.

In November of 2006, I began work on Portal to Hyrule, the new name of the site. My plan was to register and upload the new site at dhost. I began work using a website creation program. It allowed me to design the site, while it (poorly) generated the html/css. The original files are lost forever, except the images which I created using MS Paint as well as several online image tools to create things like gradients. Below, you can see a re-creation of what the site would have looked like.

My plan changed after meeting Dustin Frampton. Dustin taught me HTML and CSS in addition to giving me a copy of his Photoshop CS2. With my new tools, I began work on a new layout. This new layout was much more complicated. I spent hours upon hours working on it. Once it was finally finished, I started coding, but stopped after realizing that I made the design difficult to code; at least for my knowledge at the time.

For the next layout, I started from scratch. I began designing the layout piece by piece. Each part had its own Photoshop document. The header, the navigation, the footer, etc. Because my coding knowledge was still lacking, I used the structure of the old red layout of Zelda Domain to get me started. After two long years of laziness, PTH finally opened doors on June 28th, 2008. We lacked content, and had many dead links, but the home page and forums worked like a charm.

After PTH launched, I soon began work on PTH 2.0. I honed my Photoshop skills and redesigned the entire site. The design, as well as the code, was much cleaner. When I was working on the next version of the site, I had the idea for PTHI. The “I” stood for “Interactive.” This whole new part of the website would have had games and user content such as fan-art and fan-fiction. I designed a layout specifically for this part of the site and coded the basics of the layout itself, but PTHI never saw the light of day for several different reasons. With the new design, also came new content. Not much, but still better than the amount we had before. The new layout launched on April 5th of ‘09.

After several months of sparsely working on content, I began work on yet another design. This is the design you see today. Right now only the home page and this page are up, however, work on the game pages has been long underway since the sketching of this layout started. In the future, each of the game pages will be up with the new layout. After, the forums and media gallery will undergo a major overhaul as well, with layouts matching this. Aside from these, there are many new interactive features that will be implemented into the site itself. Just you wait!