TutShelf.com

[alexrogahn]

So TutShelf launched today and I couldn’t be happier. Just posted because I want to know what you guys think about it :D

[Rob MacKay]

there are no tutorials on it :P

[alexrogahn]

They’ll be a few surprises tomorrow ;)

[ikthius]

So articles & home page are the exact same page apart from the Articles page has a title called articles???

why the double up?

also tutorials & freedies are not found?

dude why say something has launched when about 50% of your site is non existent
There is advertising space but no adverts…. to me that is just a waste of space

sorry just to recap:
5 page site
2 pages not there
2 pages the exact same, so 1 effectively
and a small about page

I count only 2 pages in your 5, less than half of your site is actually up and running.

sorry if I am offending, but to me it should not be launched until your site is complete with tutorials, freebies and a seperate home page

[alexrogahn]

The reason 2 pages are "missing" is because WordPress is working behind the scenes and as of now there are not any public tutorials and freebies, to be found. Of course if you knew anything about WordPress you’d know this, this also explains the first problem/rant you had of the article page being the same as the front page, because the only posts at this moment are in the category "articles" makes sense; no? As for advertising you should be happy not to have flashing links telling you to buy some design related crap.

I would also like to point out I was rushed a bit by my colleague since it was suppose to launch on the 1st May.

EDIT: Web Basics 1 tutorial screencast added to public posts.

[apostrophe]

If you can’t take criticism why put your site up for review?

Ikthius is right, it’s a half finished site.

[ikthius]

"alexrogahn" wrote:

So TutShelf launched today and I couldn’t be happier. Just posted because I want to know what you guys think about it :D

A half finsished website being launched???
Why launch it?

Also I told you what I thought, but this was your reaction to what I wrote..

"alexrogahn" wrote:

The reason 2 pages are "missing" is because WordPress is working behind the scenes and as of now there are not any public tutorials and freebies, to be found. Of course if you knew anything about WordPress you’d know this, this also explains the first problem/rant you had of the article page being the same as the front page, because the only posts at this moment are in the category "articles" makes sense; no? As for advertising you should be happy not to have flashing links telling you to buy some design related crap.

I would also like to point out I was rushed a bit by my colleague since it was suppose to launch on the 1st May.

EDIT: Web Basics 1 tutorial screencast added to public posts.

it is April 6th today, May 1st is a good month away, plenty of time to fill the site before launch.

If you had thought about it, you could have had a home page that stands out from the rest as it is really a welcoming part of your site, that should hopefully keep your reader… No? e.g.
if it was me, although I don’t know wordpress, I would have put the latest post/Articles on the home page, not a list of them, or if I did want the list I would not keep it near the top. While I am here, I would say that if your going to put in different categories, why not have different sections for the different categories, which is easy to do by calling the category and getting the latest post in that category, but then again I don’t know wordpress.

your not found pages on wordpress could have been better with a coming soon message, then you could have overwritten that page… No? that would have shown the reader that the page existed.

"alexrogahn" wrote:

flashing links telling you to buy some design related crap.

if its crap then why have the space for it, seriously?

I just see your site as black & green, there is such a small difference on your black, I can’t really see it, no real header or footer as such, I have to look hard to see it is slightly different.

If you took what I said earlier and now badly, you should not have put out publicly that it is live, cause you actually wanted people to go to the site, which I done and was disappointed frankly.

so here is my good bit of critecism, it looks clean. although I would use other colours to distinguish some aspects of the site, e.g. Articles. but you should take all kinds of critecism, not just the good, not everyone will enjoy what you do and others will try to show you errors, like I was doing. is that fair enough?

[alexrogahn]

Ok I’m going to try to be polite. The design itself is complete, just not the content although we do have about 5 or 6 articles on reserve, we just didn’t want to release them all at once.

As for the homepage. It’s just going with the standard blog layout. I’m not as good as most of the other design bloggers, so if they’re copying off each other please don’t expect me to be the "saviour of blog layouts."

I’m going to add sub-categories soon (and a forum, but shush!), I never had the chance because of our much shortened deadline. The "coming soon" suggestion I’ll accept is better than just leaving it at the wordpress default.

The ad’s I hate but it’s the only way I’m gonna be able to keep this thing online, (mt) is a bit expensive for a 14 year old (yes that’s right I’m fourteen, who cares!?.) Thankfully I’m going to move of (mt) because it’s (gs) service is frankly. Crap. (sorry off topic).

Black and Green!? What on earth!? For me it’s dark browns and mint green. You might want to recalibrate your monitor?

Also as for the shortened deadline it’s not my colleagues fault, I was naive and didn’t go over EVERYTHING and that ultimately led to him to thinking everything was done, thus making him think we were ready for launch, when we clearly weren’t. I apologize for that and hopefully we’ll make up for our shaky start.

[Matt]

"alexrogahn" wrote:

Thankfully I’m going to move of (mt) because it’s (gs) service is frankly. Crap. (sorry off topic).

I’ll go off topic. Why do you think it’s crap? IMHO, they have the BEST support of any company, along with plenty of goodies. Unless the programmer makes faults that cause their GPU rates to go over, I see no other problem.

[alexrogahn]

I’m on the grid service, my site goes down every week whether it be for an entire hour or just 2 minutes, I keep checking to see if I’ve use too much bandwidth or GPU, I haven’t even used half! I even checked with my ISP in case they were to blame, they (supposedly) weren’t. As for customer service and features they are absolutely awesome, but the downtime for me negates it. Anyway at least they’re trying to fix the thing, better than my Dreamhost experiences *shudder* :?

[TheDoc]

/sigh

Alex,

I would rework the design, or at least the color scheme. It’s not easy pulling off a dark background and a text-oriented site. I would consider revising.

It’s VERY easy to launch a site before it’s actually ready. We’ve all been guilty of it at one point in time or another, and it’s always when it’s your own site. You say to yourself, "I will be more motivated to add content to it if the site is live". This is just bullocks and we all know it. Always make sure the site is 100% BEFORE you launch.

You have a great domain name, I just don’t think the site was very inviting. Take a look at PSDTUTS.net for an idea of a perfect design for a tuts site.

Keep at it, always take criticism in a constructive manner.

[alexrogahn]

Well I’m working on a slightly updated version of TutShelf (think of it as v1.1) the color scheme will be a lot brighter and more welcoming, although the layout will stay the same. As well as that we’re going to implement Sub-Categories and a forum. Content-wise me and Stephen Have been working our asses off. We owe a lot of thanks to Robski for giving us a tutorial and freebie and most of all, the attention (which we love). Hopefully as I said before we will make up for out slightly shaky start ^^

[Rob MacKay]

"alexrogahn" wrote:

Well I’m working on a slightly updated version of TutShelf (think of it as v1.1) the color scheme will be a lot brighter and more welcoming, although the layout will stay the same. As well as that we’re going to implement Sub-Categories and a forum. Content-wise me and Stephen Have been working our asses off. We owe a lot of thanks to Robski for giving us a tutorial and freebie and most of all, the attention (which we love). Hopefully as I said before we will make up for out slightly shaky start ^^

Sometimes it can be hard to take advice, especially when you have worked your arse off on something… the challenge now is that you have to keep it up, keep the momentum going. As you said you are only youngens :) heck, i’m 14 years older than you and I consider myself a youngen! So hats off to you going for it, lets just see how far you can take it :)

Any advice given, in whatever way it comes across to you, take it on the chin – disarm the offence it might bring by seeing the points made. Then if they are logical, and if others agree, (and you) make the changes… Just remember content is king now the site is live…

I think you have seen the possibilities in the last day or so, with the right connections ;)

[Author]

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