

 Critique my first website [please] - unstable013
http://notezil.la

======
unstable013
I made it in my final year of Secondary School.

I was hesitant to share because the target auidence isn't exactly HN, but I
imagine that they're lots of clever people here who'd be able to emphasize
anyways.

I know that it's not the best example of responsive design and that it's
basically a sandcaste* so I was hoping for some general design mistakes that I
can learn from before I rebuild the site. Particularly things that're
unintuitive or out of place.

Thanks, Jean-Le

*I needed to complete a prototype for a competition so I ended up building a sandcaste out of javascript-- Should've used wordpress for the demo... but in the heat of everything and with writing my own final exams, I just kept building it was a single page monster with ALL of the notes being stored in the javascript file >.< Seriously... when you click a new note, it just replaces the contents of an <article>... my logic being that all the extra text in the javascript cost less bandwith than a picture.

I plan to build most of the backend stuff in Clojure, so if anyone has any
advice on that it's very welcome.

------
cgag
I really love the dinosaur, and the animations are cool.

I'm not a designer in any way, so don't take my opinions very seriously, but
here are my thoughts:

I found it non-obvious that the homepage wasn't all there is. Maybe the link
text for "adventure" should be something different.

FORUMS looks like a header to me, with the posts underneath it. I see now that
it takes you to the full forum, but I'm not sure what's going on with the
dyslexia stuff beneath it.

The word 'back' on the navigation on the right could maybe be more descriptive
depending on what page you're on.

As for Clojure, if you have any more specific questions, stop by #clojure on
freenode on irc, everyone's super helpful. I'd be glad to help with anything
more specific as well. I don't know how much you know, but compojure and ring
are the goto tools to get started with web dev in clojure.

~~~
unstable013
Thanks for taking the time cgag :) The 'non-obvious' aspects was exactly what
I'm trying to weed out going forward.

I've built some demos before- enough to appreaciate 'The Clojure Way' of doing
things over my experiences with other tools... but what I've really been
struggling with was the methodology of development- how do I start a project,
how much documentation is appropriate, keeping a tidy source tree, refactoring
etc...

I started using IRC just on your reccomendation and, it's one of my favourite
things on the internet now :) I'm not sure why I didn't start using it eariler
:D

