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Too many times I've seen maps and ideas wasted away by errors in spelling, grammar, and in triggers. Far too many maps available today are poor in the fields of professionalism and aesthetics. There are always spelling errors at every corner and bugs at every step, every cinematic, every event, purging the map of its true potential. Since there are so many of these maps out there, I've decided to write a user friendly guide on making your map look and feel professional, as well as making it aesthetically pleasing.

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Professionalism - The standing, practice, or methods of a professional, as distinguished from an amateur.
Aesthetics - The study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.
Note: When people say "aesthetically pleasing" they're referring to this definition.

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dictionary.com - A cliche website that's useful for definitions of words as well as proper spelling.
thesaurus.com - A branch of dictionary.com to find more attention grabbing words.
google.com (Proper Grammar searched) - Possibly the best search engine available.
Professionalism and Attitude - A guide on being a game/map maker with the right attitude and the right approach to professionalism.

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SCMDraft - It cannot be stressed enough that this is indeed the best map editor available. Useful tools within it for professionalism and aesthetics are the grid feature to pinpoint a precise area for units and locations, the string editor which is useful to easily track all of your strings to fix grammar and spelling errors, the sound editor which is useful for compressing .wav files for use in your map to make the download shorter, and the user friendly "Map Settings" tab, allowing you to edit map properties, forces, unit settings, upgrade settings, tech settings, strings, and .wav files all in one place. The tileset index has all of the high dirt doodads, low dirt doodads, grass doodads, etc., together. This makes it easy to find similar pieces of terrain in the tileset index right next to each other, helping you to make your blends more professional.
People to help with your map - I'm not entirely sure if this can be considered a tool but let's face it, most people, no, everyone needs help at least one time in their map. It's okay to ask people for assistance; it helps you get your map done.
Notepad++ - Useful for making text triggers. Can also be used to search in your triggers after copying the text from your map, useful for bug killing.
Tortoise SVN - Making a team map project? This tool is useful for organization and management of project resources.
Google Code - A Google supported project hoster. Useful for team projects.
Sourceforge - Source for filesharing and backing up, among other things.
The Elements of Style - By William Strunk, Jr. A guide to grammar made in 1918, though recent versions are subject to copyright. Thanks to MiniMoose2707 for finding this source in this thread.

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• Test as much as possible. The more you test, the more balance you'll have. The more you balance, the more professional your map will be. Nothing says professional more than balance. Also, while testing you will most likely find a plethora of bugs and glitches. By testing often, you will be able to fully purge your map of errors. Try and put yourself in situations that you think would mess up the map's triggers, and then fix the bugs if there happens to be any.
  
• Paste your strings into Microsoft Word (or whatever documenting tool you have) and run a quick spell check. This will weed out spelling errors, making your map more professional looking.
  
• For grammar, make sure you don't use any Internet short terms. For example, putting "u" for "you" and "ur" for "your" or "you're".
  
• Check terrain in game to find any bugs concerning height, vision, or just blocks. Use a small unit, a medium unit, and a large unit to make sure all terrain is passable (unless you want it otherwise).
  
• Test with all sorts of personalities; the more input you get from more variety, the more the map will appeal to people both professionally and aesthetically.
  
• It's much easier to find bugs if you've organized your triggers. I'm not saying to make comments on everything and waste strings, I'm saying to organize the center location triggers together, the level up triggers together, the spell triggers together, etc.
  

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Yeah, I was bored, but hopefully this will help those of you who seem to not know a thing or two about grammar and spelling. Happy mapping .

Because most people are nubs, I'd actually suggest Google Code or Sourceforge or some pre-set online source hosting thingie for collab maps rather than just raw TortoiseSVN.

Quote from Tuxedo-Templar

Because most people are nubs, I'd actually suggest Google Code or Sourceforge or some pre-set online source hosting thingie for collab maps rather than just raw TortoiseSVN.

Alright, I'll add that to the list of tools.

I like this a lot. Good job putting this together.

/pinned.

EDIT:
Though this does seem more suited for Production/Showcase. But I'll keep it here for now.

Quote from Tuxedo-Templar

Because most people are nubs, I'd actually suggest Google Code or Sourceforge or some pre-set online source hosting thingie for collab maps rather than just raw TortoiseSVN.

Because most people are nubs and can't make a map alone let alone make a map with another person, I suggest they just stay away from team projects, especially if it gets technical with all these extra programs and stuff. You're also assuming that they only use trigedit.

Quote from DevliN

I like this a lot. Good job putting this together.

/pinned.

EDIT:
Though this does seem more suited for Production/Showcase. But I'll keep it here for now.

If you want to move it that's fine with me. Since this forum is generally blank of activity, it might be suited better there, more people will see it, and it's in the "production" forum, giving them an eye opener on the field of professionalism.

I support the movement.

Use a consistent colouring scheme for messages of different types. It may also be appropriate to use different colouring for units as well, like all heroes are Blue names, all allies are Yellow and all enemies are Red (if you have distinct unit types for allies/enemies).

For example in DS Night Fixed I went with a yellow/orange scheme for protoss units, blue/green for terran and red/purple for zerg.

Quote from Lanthanide

Use a consistent colouring scheme for messages of different types. It may also be appropriate to use different colouring for units as well, like all heroes are Blue names, all allies are Yellow and all enemies are Red (if you have distinct unit types for allies/enemies).

For example in DS Night Fixed I went with a yellow/orange scheme for protoss units, blue/green for terran and red/purple for zerg.

Good point: color is extremely important.

what i notice about some maps is that the player colors always keep changing and if this happens it really makes your map look unprofessional. Also i hate terrain piece(s) with blocks i just want to take them and fix them. When the map really does stupid things like this one mass map where he couldn't write out text triggers so he put text on buildings and put them in one line... i mean come on wtf...

So really the little things about the game...