Browse Tutorials

[ram4nd]

http://browse-tutorials.com/

 

I just moved my site from CodeIgniter to Drupal. I would like to get your professional opinion.

[QuickOldCar]

I like the idea of the site, always nice to have more organized sites.

 

The background I don't like, made me feel like in a hospital.

 

Must be hard work locating and tagging all the tutorials.

[The Little Guy]

Like the Idea!

 

I think you should add phone app tutorials (android, iphone, others). That would be very nice, I have been trying to make an android app, and I don't find the website very helpful, unless I want documentation, but it has nothing for specifics such as loading a picture saving data to a remote server, etc.

 

some design:

When I clicked on a photoshop tutorial, with as little as there is on the page, it took me a 5-10 seconds to realize where the link to the tutorial was. It doesn't stick out much. Maybe have the title of the page as the text and the link open in a new window.

 

If you ever checked out good-tutorials.com, they use an icon next to it for a tiny preview of what the link contains.

[Adam]

Personally I don't like the idea.

 

Tutorials

 

The last thing the internet needs is yet another tutorial site. Your site offers no more than a basic search engine, but requires more effort and produces a lot less results. While you can register/login, you can't really do anything other than contribute tutorials/snippets. All this site will do at best, is get crawled by Google and force the user to have to go through another website to get to where they actually want to be. Just so that the owner can make a bit of money off the adverts.

 

It only annoys me so much because I'm fed up of clicking a result on Google, only to be taken to some other portal site. I have to spend 10 seconds looking for the right link that isn't some advert trying to trick me, which opens in a new window. Then I have to wait 5 seconds on a full page Ad to click continue, then only to have to close some 3 inch frame at the top. Fairly extreme case of course, but it's an annoying process that seems to be getting worse.

 

If this is just for demonstrating your abilities, or as personal project to develop your skills, obviously that's completely understandable and I take back what I said - although it may be courteous to other users to restrict search engines from indexing the site, or perhaps just the tutorial side of it.

 

Snippets

 

The snippets side of the site I don't really take any stand against. Can be handy I suppose to quickly look up the syntax or structure of a piece of code. There's not much explanation of what the code does though..? It would be far more benefiting to have an explanation of the code, and/or a break-down of what each bit does... I suppose that's down to whoever submits them though I guess. Also some of the code on there at the moment isn't of particularly good quality.

 

Design

 

There's not much to it really. It doesn't seem to quite reach a classy "simplistic" appeal, just looks a little plain/dull... and thin. Would it not be worth widening it, especially for the snippets? The header's pretty dull too. The mark-up code be done better. You make no use of semantic text tags (h1, h2, p, etc.) The class names look bizarrely long, especially for a site of this size. It seems quite excessive too for what's displayed.

 

Usability

 

I feel a little lost sometimes when using the site. Browsing through categories I have no idea what's going to be a snippet or a tutorial. The pagination forces me to click the right arrow 4 times if I want to go to the 5th page. It's also hard to spot the actual link on the tutorial page.

 

--

 

Apologies if you feel I was overly blunt here, but you asked for a critique. Knowing what's wrong is the way forward!

[ram4nd]

Thank you for your replays.

 

I would like to explain some things.

 

Disan needis improving, I know that.

 

Snippets are snippets, they don't need explanation. Point isn't to find them via browsing, but from google using certain keywords. Right now all snipets are made by me. Just some useful stuff. Snippets are very specific.

 

I haven't put much effort on making a community. Its more like, if you find anything useful then good for you. Mostly by google and targeted keywords.

 

Final point. This site is also a place where i store my code that i reuse. I might always forget something. I also have learned a lot while building it. So the site is not pointless.