I've read pretty much everything on the site and between the high level marketing speak and generic wireframes, I have no idea what it does or what problem it actually solves. There's even a link if you hover over about that says "Learn about why we exist". I thought for sure that would have something, but it's just a list of all the employees. It looks like the only way to figure out what it actually does is to sign up.
If had come across their site without any context I would have assumed it was a generic marketing site template that needed to be filled in. I'm sorry for being so negative, but I am interested in documentation related technology and it bugs me that I can't for the life of me figure out what this is after seing things posted about it on Hackernews for the last few years.
Hey! We do API documentation, plus a bunch of other tools. All the logos are click-able (for example: https://developers.intercom.com/) if you want an example.
So, basically, we sit at developer.whatever.com, and take care of everything from reference guides to marketing pages to tutorials to support forums. If you have any more questions or feedback, feel free to email me at greg@readme.io!
We're always updating the homepage, so we'll definitely do our best to make it more clear in the future!
Cool product, but +1 on better links. I’d definitely add a big demo button on the homepage. I just wanted to see how the docs look, but flipped through 3 pages and couldn’t find a single real screenshot or link. Finally just went to Trello’s docs myself to see an example.
Also, the company logos don’t appear at all on an iPad in portrait mode.
Thanks, I think I understand now. I honestly would have never guessed those were clickable without hovering. All I did was scroll. I didn't move the cursor so I also didn't notice the image change on mouse over.
Did you go to the products page? Not questioning what you said at all just curious how deep you dug (obvs apex should have the info you were missing), but as someone that is pretty familiar with their offering and someone that has hosted api docs and sdk documentation through other sources their copy and marketing is on point for me - and the marketer/founder in me wants to know where the disconnect happened for you.
Yes. It was pretty much the first thing I read actually. It makes a little more sense after a re-read. I still have no idea why there are snippets of code at the top telling me how to make a POST request. Anyway, I'm a developer, so when I evaluate something I'm very focused on "how do I use this for real in production and how much pain is it going to cause me?"
So what I usually do first thing is go look for the documentation. When I clicked on "documentation" the first time I expected documentation. It's under the "Products" section at the top and bottom of the page, and that can be interpreted as "product documentation" or "documentation for the product". But as you know, it's the marketing page for a product called "Documentation".
On that page I couldn't really get any more information other than "Easy to Update Within Seconds - Sync your Swagger file, update content in our editor, or merge a suggested edit to make sure docs are always up to date."
I'm not sure what this means. Is this a manual process I have to do or do you have an API call I can hook into my build system?
Is having a Swagger or OpenAPI file a requirement? If not, what's the alternative?
How does the changelog work? Do you read it out of a git repo or manage it on the site?
I have more questions along those lines and I think some screenshots or documentation for actually using the readme documentation product would help a lot.
Thanks for the feedback! We can work to make these answers more obvious on the site, but in the meantime:
> I'm not sure what this means. Is this a manual process I have to do or do you have an API call I can hook into my build system?
We do have an API and a CLI tool for automating, or you can sync it in the UI.
> Is having a Swagger or OpenAPI file a requirement? If not, what's the alternative?
Nope, we have a manual editor in the UI for describing your API!
> How does the changelog work?
It's just a blog mostly, but with icons for different types of changes
> Do you read it out of a git repo or manage it on the site?
Everything is on the site, since locking it in git makes it tougher for non technical coworkers to make changes. That being said, you can sync it to git. We have built in page history, versioning, and our own version of pull requests called "suggested edits".
> I have more questions along those lines and I think some screenshots or documentation for actually using the readme documentation product would help a lot.
Good to know - maybe some more prominent case studies with links to the real generated end product would be helpful.
The placeholder mockups are a pretty generic side menu / text content area and adding in an Intercom or Trello logo doesn't really clarify what is being mocked.
Definitely some internal vernacular being used in the copy, too. What is a developer hub? Again the mockups dont' clarify much.
100% agree after a second glance the use of "Documentation" as a product is confusing when you consider 99/100 saas/tech companies have a documentation page for _their_ docs. Maybe something like "Hosted Documentation" or "<Your Company's> Documentation" would work. Thanks for the thoughtful response.
If had come across their site without any context I would have assumed it was a generic marketing site template that needed to be filled in. I'm sorry for being so negative, but I am interested in documentation related technology and it bugs me that I can't for the life of me figure out what this is after seing things posted about it on Hackernews for the last few years.