6 ms·

Ask HN: Please Critique My (Tokenadult's) Website.

9 points by tokenadult 14y ago

I saw the thread "My experiences with Hacker News" earlier today, and that prompts me to ask for your help. I have just rolled in new HTML5 mark-up for my seventeen-year-old personal website, Learn in Freedom: Education Reform and Homeschooling Resources. http://learninfreedom.org/ The site largely lay fallow for the last decade while my children were all young and my late father was a quadriplegic during the last six years of his life. Now I'm trying to catch up with updating the site, and I'm happy to hear your suggestions about what needs to be fixed. Your comments on 1) usability and general user-friendliness, 2) accuracy and completeness of content (including suggestions of reliable sources to bring the content up to date), 3) accessibility (especially for people like me with subpar vision and hand mobility), 4) information architecture and site navigation, 5) search engine optimization and clear page and section titles, and 6) anything else you notice would be greatly appreciated. The site has been in such bad neglect that I only began mentioning it in my Hacker News profile this week. I won't be offended if you tell me the site looks old-fashioned and needs lots of work--it does. Thanks for any suggestions you have.

tokenadult 14y ago
Clickable link to the Learn in Freedom site home page: http://learninfreedom.org/ http://learninfreedom.org/ Thanks for your comments.
JacobAldridge 14y ago
Having not read your HN profile (one of the best we have here, incidentally) since you added this site back in, it took me a moment to reconcile your real name with your handle - kind of a Wizard of Oz moment for someone who has been appreciative of your many contributions on HN over the years. Enough of an aside, back to LearninFreedom. Yes, it is a little old-fashioned. I couldn't have done better mind you - the key items I notice that make it feel that way are: 1) The site logo. There may be a great history behind it[1]. It does look like 13 year-old MS Paint with two different fonts (incl the TM). Could be 'streamlined' and would immediately add fresh impact. (This also goes for the favicon). 2) On my laptop (19 inch widescreen, running Windows 7, FF 18.0.1) the body of the website is left aligned and leaves almost a third of my screen on the right hand side as white space. My (non-technical) observation of other sites (including ones I've worked on [2]) are that they tend toward centering the content so widescreen users get some whitespace either side, which I also find aids readability. So my mind sees 'centered content' as more recent, and therefore your site as 'older'. 3) It wasn't clear to me initially who your audience was and what 'Learn in Freedom'(TM) actually meant. It may be common terminology in your target audience, so don't force a change because of me; at first I interpreted "taking responsibility for your own learning" to mean life-long learning, eg Khan Academy, adults using the local library. Later it became clearer this was more about Homeschooling - is that correct? Is it also supplemental homeschooling - ie, teaching your kids other things while still mainstreaming them[3]? So the introduction could perhaps have better explained what 'Learn in Freedom' means and who the site is built for. 4) Usability point - the site would benefit from a clearer content structure. The content, listed in A-Z, is also broken down into a few headings on the homepage and categories / subcategories in the site map. These could be made clearer, so as to make the content more digestible. Other categories could be "Getting started", "Where to ask for Help", "Supplemental v Full Time", "Curriculum / Lesson Ideas" etc (again - I'm not specifically your audience, these are just the things I would be interested if I was starting down this road. Experiencing homeschoolers would likely see a different structure to the content). = It almost ... almost ... goes without saying - thanks for sharing, and putting the site out there for open feedback. How fabulous that it was a post from a 17 year old that compelled our tokenadult to do so. = [1] Eg, 'This logo was created by one of my children in 1999 when they first started using computers to learn from home'. If it's a great story, maybe that could be mentioned (eg, as a mouseover). [2] See http://everydaydreamholiday.com http://everydaydreamholiday.com and http://www.shirlawscoaching.co.uk/ http://www.shirlawscoaching.co.uk/ , not as examples of beautiful sites but rather to my point about whitespace and centering. Both were built out of templates (Wordpress and Squarespace respectively). [3]If so, it's a topic I'm fascinated by, though not ready for yet (absence of actual children being my main roadblock). To that extent, I found the home page excellent in regards contents and wealth of links (which I haven't followed, however). I can't really comment on updating the content or direct you to other bodies of knowledge in this field, but I feel better for having reviewed the site and thought some more about my future options as a (future) parent.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Those are all very helpful comments. Thanks.
Mz 14y ago
The font was hard on my eyes. Black text on a white background is not the best. Offwhite or other pale shades tend to work better. The site map has a lot of things in it which look like they are supposed to be hyperlinks but there is no link. I knew of the site back when I had a pet dinosaur and was homeschooling my own kids. I knew it to be a gold standard site. Even at the time, I found it frustrating to navigate. That aspect certainly has room for improvement. What sorts of resources are you looking for? The last time I asked around, certain older items were still the gold standard with apparently no newer competitors. Though there are also a lot of new resources which did not exist back when I began homeschooling. I am thinking on how to revive my own parenting/homeschooling site. I have been thinking on how to use HN as a resource for doing that. I can share my tentative thoughts in that regard if you are interested. I am really glad to hear you wish to revive it.
trevelyan 14y ago
Feedback as requested. Comments are not intended to be critical in any way, just trying to give feedback since you asked for it on what would make the site more usable and immediately intuitive as someone not terribly familiar with home-schooling: (1) You have a triple site-title (header, image and main page) which takes up a lot of space. You could also save space up top by pushing the copyright notice to the bottom of the page where it will be less aggressive. The prominence makes me wonder if you are worried about people stealing copy and might be off-putting to casual browsers. (2) It took me a while to figure out what was on the site. Not because your description was wrong or inaccurate, but because the words "learn" and "freedom" are so generic that the combination didn't provide any substantive clue as to what was on the site until I looked at the site archive. It also made the first paragraph hard to scan. The titles of the subcategories seem vague. "School is Dead" is much catchier topic. Perhaps change the intro text to spike the reader's interest? :) (3) CSS recommendations: try bumping up line-height to 1.6 for main text, and decrease both font-size and line height for blockquote elements to make the site more readable, and set quoted passages off from the main text.
tianshuo 14y ago
I recommend you use bootstrap and get a template from http://wrapbootstrap.com http://wrapbootstrap.com
JoachimSchipper 14y ago
I don't think I - from a country where homeschooling is extremely uncommon, and who generally liked school - am your target audience. Still, a quick read through the front page set off my "crazy" detector at least twice - once at the Mill quote ("despotism over the mind"; repeated twice) and again when you linked schooling to the Third Reich. You may want to tone that down a bit if you want to be accessible to the not-yet-converted. The header contains no fewer than four navigation aids - site map, site index, site search and the Google search bar (and the last two are redundant). Consider putting the categories from your site map into your header instead - e.g. "college FAQ", "Getting started" (+ reading), "Recommended books". Parts of your site are likely to be utterly out of date. This isn't too bad for some pages - the educational stuff may miss the newest insights and corrections, but should still be mostly correct - but I can image that e.g. college admissions have changed a lot since the last real update of that page, and getting that wrong could seriously hurt your readers. Such pages could use a "this information is current as of 2004; it will be updated in the coming weeks" header. Your copyright claim is confusing, partly because it seems narrower than fair use ("... for the purpose of..."). Consider something like "may be freely copied, provided no changes are made and proper attribution is given, for government and other non-commercial purposes only" or just "I want to see homeschooling well-represented; if you want to republish my work, do not hesitate to contact me for permission". I'm far from an expert, but you don't seem to be doing anything really stupid SEO-wise, which gets you most of the way there. Though in the interest of making people like your site more, you could consider the fact that people really like smiling kids. (It's cliche because it works.) If you haven't already done so, consider scanning for broken links sooner rather than later. I like the "linkchecker" tool, which - with a bit of configuration - can handle a whole site at once; but there are plenty of other options.

9 points by tokenadult 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago

Clickable link to the Learn in Freedom site home page: http://learninfreedom.org/ http://learninfreedom.org/ Thanks for your comments.

JacobAldridge 14y ago

Having not read your HN profile (one of the best we have here, incidentally) since you added this site back in, it took me a moment to reconcile your real name with your handle - kind of a Wizard of Oz moment for someone who has been appreciative of your many contributions on HN over the years. Enough of an aside, back to LearninFreedom. Yes, it is a little old-fashioned. I couldn't have done better mind you - the key items I notice that make it feel that way are: 1) The site logo. There may be a great history behind it[1]. It does look like 13 year-old MS Paint with two different fonts (incl the TM). Could be 'streamlined' and would immediately add fresh impact. (This also goes for the favicon). 2) On my laptop (19 inch widescreen, running Windows 7, FF 18.0.1) the body of the website is left aligned and leaves almost a third of my screen on the right hand side as white space. My (non-technical) observation of other sites (including ones I've worked on [2]) are that they tend toward centering the content so widescreen users get some whitespace either side, which I also find aids readability. So my mind sees 'centered content' as more recent, and therefore your site as 'older'. 3) It wasn't clear to me initially who your audience was and what 'Learn in Freedom'(TM) actually meant. It may be common terminology in your target audience, so don't force a change because of me; at first I interpreted "taking responsibility for your own learning" to mean life-long learning, eg Khan Academy, adults using the local library. Later it became clearer this was more about Homeschooling - is that correct? Is it also supplemental homeschooling - ie, teaching your kids other things while still mainstreaming them[3]? So the introduction could perhaps have better explained what 'Learn in Freedom' means and who the site is built for. 4) Usability point - the site would benefit from a clearer content structure. The content, listed in A-Z, is also broken down into a few headings on the homepage and categories / subcategories in the site map. These could be made clearer, so as to make the content more digestible. Other categories could be "Getting started", "Where to ask for Help", "Supplemental v Full Time", "Curriculum / Lesson Ideas" etc (again - I'm not specifically your audience, these are just the things I would be interested if I was starting down this road. Experiencing homeschoolers would likely see a different structure to the content). = It almost ... almost ... goes without saying - thanks for sharing, and putting the site out there for open feedback. How fabulous that it was a post from a 17 year old that compelled our tokenadult to do so. = [1] Eg, 'This logo was created by one of my children in 1999 when they first started using computers to learn from home'. If it's a great story, maybe that could be mentioned (eg, as a mouseover). [2] See http://everydaydreamholiday.com http://everydaydreamholiday.com and http://www.shirlawscoaching.co.uk/ http://www.shirlawscoaching.co.uk/ , not as examples of beautiful sites but rather to my point about whitespace and centering. Both were built out of templates (Wordpress and Squarespace respectively). [3]If so, it's a topic I'm fascinated by, though not ready for yet (absence of actual children being my main roadblock). To that extent, I found the home page excellent in regards contents and wealth of links (which I haven't followed, however). I can't really comment on updating the content or direct you to other bodies of knowledge in this field, but I feel better for having reviewed the site and thought some more about my future options as a (future) parent.

tokenadult 14y ago
Those are all very helpful comments. Thanks.

Mz 14y ago

The font was hard on my eyes. Black text on a white background is not the best. Offwhite or other pale shades tend to work better. The site map has a lot of things in it which look like they are supposed to be hyperlinks but there is no link. I knew of the site back when I had a pet dinosaur and was homeschooling my own kids. I knew it to be a gold standard site. Even at the time, I found it frustrating to navigate. That aspect certainly has room for improvement. What sorts of resources are you looking for? The last time I asked around, certain older items were still the gold standard with apparently no newer competitors. Though there are also a lot of new resources which did not exist back when I began homeschooling. I am thinking on how to revive my own parenting/homeschooling site. I have been thinking on how to use HN as a resource for doing that. I can share my tentative thoughts in that regard if you are interested. I am really glad to hear you wish to revive it.

trevelyan 14y ago

Feedback as requested. Comments are not intended to be critical in any way, just trying to give feedback since you asked for it on what would make the site more usable and immediately intuitive as someone not terribly familiar with home-schooling: (1) You have a triple site-title (header, image and main page) which takes up a lot of space. You could also save space up top by pushing the copyright notice to the bottom of the page where it will be less aggressive. The prominence makes me wonder if you are worried about people stealing copy and might be off-putting to casual browsers. (2) It took me a while to figure out what was on the site. Not because your description was wrong or inaccurate, but because the words "learn" and "freedom" are so generic that the combination didn't provide any substantive clue as to what was on the site until I looked at the site archive. It also made the first paragraph hard to scan. The titles of the subcategories seem vague. "School is Dead" is much catchier topic. Perhaps change the intro text to spike the reader's interest? :) (3) CSS recommendations: try bumping up line-height to 1.6 for main text, and decrease both font-size and line height for blockquote elements to make the site more readable, and set quoted passages off from the main text.

tianshuo 14y ago

I recommend you use bootstrap and get a template from http://wrapbootstrap.com http://wrapbootstrap.com

JoachimSchipper 14y ago

I don't think I - from a country where homeschooling is extremely uncommon, and who generally liked school - am your target audience. Still, a quick read through the front page set off my "crazy" detector at least twice - once at the Mill quote ("despotism over the mind"; repeated twice) and again when you linked schooling to the Third Reich. You may want to tone that down a bit if you want to be accessible to the not-yet-converted. The header contains no fewer than four navigation aids - site map, site index, site search and the Google search bar (and the last two are redundant). Consider putting the categories from your site map into your header instead - e.g. "college FAQ", "Getting started" (+ reading), "Recommended books". Parts of your site are likely to be utterly out of date. This isn't too bad for some pages - the educational stuff may miss the newest insights and corrections, but should still be mostly correct - but I can image that e.g. college admissions have changed a lot since the last real update of that page, and getting that wrong could seriously hurt your readers. Such pages could use a "this information is current as of 2004; it will be updated in the coming weeks" header. Your copyright claim is confusing, partly because it seems narrower than fair use ("... for the purpose of..."). Consider something like "may be freely copied, provided no changes are made and proper attribution is given, for government and other non-commercial purposes only" or just "I want to see homeschooling well-represented; if you want to republish my work, do not hesitate to contact me for permission". I'm far from an expert, but you don't seem to be doing anything really stupid SEO-wise, which gets you most of the way there. Though in the interest of making people like your site more, you could consider the fact that people really like smiling kids. (It's cliche because it works.) If you haven't already done so, consider scanning for broken links sooner rather than later. I like the "linkchecker" tool, which - with a bit of configuration - can handle a whole site at once; but there are plenty of other options.