

Show HN: First site I've built, Personalized Makeup site for Beginners - arethusa

Hi HN,<p>This is the first site I&#x27;ve built. I know it probably won&#x27;t be interesting to most of you but I think it&#x27;s pretty helpful to people interested in  makeup: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savvyist.com<p>I hope to make it easier for anyone who wants to get started with makeup, as it can be a really useful tool, and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be.<p>I learned Ruby on Rails to create it using the  amazing book&#x2F;tutorial by Michael Hartl and some good codecademy courses. I was formerly a User Experience Designer at Nokia &amp; didn&#x27;t know how to code before then. If you want to know more about how I got started, feel free to ask me, I can give you my email address. I would love to meet more female coders in particular!<p>Hope you like it :)
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viraptor
Looks great! Can't tell anything about the content really... but for the site
itself:

\- I like the merged signup/in

\- The "try customizing this page" is a bit technical and it's far enough from
the following text that I didn't think they were related

\- I find the constantly changing faces distracting... maybe a smoother and/or
longer transition could help?

\- After clicking on one of the guides, I got the top bar and a white page -
the main image took so long to load that I thought the page broke. This may
just happen on slow connections. (I could scroll down already, but wouldn't
know that without looking at the scroll bar)

\- The footer with about / story / blog / legal links is not available on the
front page - on purpose?

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arethusa
Thank you so much for checking it out and for the feedback, viraptor!!

\- Good point on the "customize this page". I showed it to someone today and
they thought it changed the page "skin", like the color of the page. I will
muse about how to make it clearer...

\- You're right, the transition is quite slow. I think maybe it is jquery
being laggy? I'm pretty newb with javascript, I will look into if there are
any smoother transitions.

\- Lol. That's what I get for being close to a university and having really
good connections. I will try to figure out how to make it faster on slow
connections.

\- For the footer, not on purpose, I just didn't want there to be too many
things to take them off the homepage. Also the About/story/ is pretty outdated
so I need to update that. I will add it in after I update, since you think it
is useful to see early on.

Thank you again for taking the time to check it out, I really appreciate it!

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ddv
Looks great, especially for your first site.

How long did it take you to learn Ruby/Rails?

Do you have prior software development experience?

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arethusa
Hi ddv,

Thanks so much for the compliments!

It took me about 2 weeks to go through Michael Hartl's tutorial,
[https://www.railstutorial.org/](https://www.railstutorial.org/). After I had
gone through the tutorial, I still didn't fully grasp some fundamentals like
what an MVC framework was; I only figured that out as I started building out
my site. I still feel like I can't call myself a developer, since I have a
poor understanding of things like JSON and asynchronous stuff.

I had taken an intro course a while ago in college; it was on ANT assembly
language and C. So I had some understanding of if/then loops and obscure
things like pointers, but I had no understanding of web development and how to
create something myself. I also had no knowledge of Javascript or CSS
beforehand, and little understanding of HTML. I used Codeacademy to learn the
basics, and of course the wonderland, Stack Overflow :)

My next goal is to learn how to create an app, but I haven't found any good
resources for that yet.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

~~~
marvel_boy
Really nice portal. From the design point is quite good, the backgorund
palette of colors contrast nicely with the makeup photos. Don't worry too much
about technical details, design layout is what clients see on first spot. And
your design is quite good !

~~~
arethusa
Thanks marvel_boy :) I appreciate it!!!

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zz1
Clickable: [http://www.savvyist.com](http://www.savvyist.com)

~~~
arethusa
Thank you :)

