Hi, a couple of suggestions here:
1. Landing page. It is not very clear for me what is the basic "free" course. Will I be able to go all the way up to building my app with the free one? If you write it as Course 1: RoR Basics, you lead me to think you will only tell me how to define variables and then try to charge me for it.
If the case is that you can build all the first app for free, I would change the wording to: Course 1: Your first app, or something like that.
2. Once I click on take the course, you redirect me to a page where I only find text. Wait...this is not what I wanted...bail.
I think that once you redirect, the first thing you should see is the course (or the console), so you can start exploring and falling in love with RoR.
3. There is way too much content in that second page...it feels more like a blog post. I would put a link to that content in the main page under three small links: Why codelearn? Why Ruby on Rails? Do I need Ruby? or something like that.
4. Most important: Why is all the scary code in the first class? If I am a newbie and I see that, I would think its way to complicated! Start with something easy...there is a reason why "Hello World" is the first thing you learn in any language out there.
5. Also, I cannot try the things as a anonymous user (I don't know about registered ones), because the console is nowhere in the page!
Point 1 & 2 taken. I agree to your observation. The user should be shown 'Aha' moment ASAP & we are only delaying it which is bad.
Point 3 - guess this is classic example of we founders trying to show the philosophy as the first thing to the user. While he/she wants to learn RoR. Guess we should create a separate link 'Philosophy' on the main page & link the content there. Something like https://supportbee.com/ .
Point 4 - guess the command out is too long (especially the rails new part) which is making it look long.
Point 5 - a linux user is needed at the backend & hence there is a signup process for that. We need to figure out a sub-optimal way to provide console access to non-signed up users as well like what Codecademy etc do on their main page.
This is Hemanth, other co-founder at codelearn. all that code you see is actually command output, not exactly code. You only have to type in small commands at console, for first 5-6 lessons.
Its Hindi (national language of India) for me & Kannada (a local language here in India) for my co-founder. We are reasonably good with spoken English but guess the written part is reasonably bad. We are on a lookout for a good tech guy who likes what we are doing, loves to write & can help us with the content creation & proof-reading.
Thanks. Do give the Codelearn Playground a spin. The tasks are not prominently visible & you would need to wade through the lessons to see them. Would appreciate some feedback here or you may drop them to us personally - founders@codelearn.org
Caution: Things should be reasonably stable but you may expect some beta hiccups. Some hiccups might also come due to high HN traffic. We have reasonably low traffic otherwise. The server is a small EC2 instance.
2. Once I click on take the course, you redirect me to a page where I only find text. Wait...this is not what I wanted...bail. I think that once you redirect, the first thing you should see is the course (or the console), so you can start exploring and falling in love with RoR.
3. There is way too much content in that second page...it feels more like a blog post. I would put a link to that content in the main page under three small links: Why codelearn? Why Ruby on Rails? Do I need Ruby? or something like that.
4. Most important: Why is all the scary code in the first class? If I am a newbie and I see that, I would think its way to complicated! Start with something easy...there is a reason why "Hello World" is the first thing you learn in any language out there.
5. Also, I cannot try the things as a anonymous user (I don't know about registered ones), because the console is nowhere in the page!
Good luck guys, I wish you the best.