

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

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.<p>http://learninfreedom.org/<p>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.
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JacobAldridge
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> and
<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
Those are all very helpful comments. Thanks.

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JoachimSchipper
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.

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

------
tokenadult
Clickable link to the Learn in Freedom site home page:

<http://learninfreedom.org/>

Thanks for your comments.

------
Mz
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.

