I shot the video just maybe 10 minutes after launching the site. Comments are starting to roll in and this is me kind of reacting to some of that. Like anything of this nature, there are reactions both positive and negative. “I hate it!!” and “I like it!!” are common. Of course “I like it!!” is preferred because it makes you feel good, but they are both rather useless being free of specific critique.
This was (and always is) a rather emotional time, because people will really come out of the woodwork to give you an opinion they formulated in just a few glances on something you’ve sweated over for months (and really, years).
The trick is:
- Learn to be rational and somewhat thick-skinned. Haters gonna hate.
- Be nice no matter what. Responding negatively fuels a nasty cycle of hate.
- Dig into every bit of real criticism you can find. Comments, especially in aggregate, can be a useful to mine for ways to improve.
There were a number of issues that cropped up right at launch that were made clear in the comments and I was able to fix right away. For instance, the icon font wasn’t showing up properly in Firefox. That was because Firefox has some cross-domain restrictions on where @font-face fonts can be loaded from and mine were all the sudden being served by a CDN instead of css-tricks.com. I was able to hear those comments, find a solution, and fix it. Go community!
I skipped to here from the low hundreds so I’ve got about a third left. Thanks for the brief ability to list in reverse order. Now that the list is more or less stable it’s less important so I don’t mind that it is missing now. I like the ability to mark as watched, but two things would help in this regard: 1. I’d like to filter so I only see what I have not yet watched. The little text in the corner is functional but not as helpful as it could be. 2. I’d like to mark a video watched from the page where I watched it rather than only from the list of videos. I’ve started a redesign of my church’s website and this video series is really helping. Thanks!
Hey Chris, great series! And a great re-design that keeps growing on me more and more after the initial surprise!
Just a quick one, in the page nav it says there’s 158 videos? I’m assuming it’s a typo but thought I’d check if there are still more videos to come?
Thanks!
I really like how you react to this kind of useless criticism and just keep rocking. The new design is great, and especially after watching nearly all the screencasts I understand and see a lot of the small decisions and optimizations that you made. Thanks!
I’ve watched every screencast now. I really enjoyed them. I’m looking forward to the next lot you do. I think I probably burned through them pretty quickly.
The main thing that stood out to me is generally how few problems you had launching (at least it looked like apart from fonts). I really like the whole set up of wordpress plugins locally, then pushing to beanstalk, to update and that general way of it just working. I’ve never been able to get the updater and plugins to install locally. Is there something that you’ve done different I’ve missed? Not quite sure really.
Also any hints as to what you’ll be doing next?
Hi Chris
I was Hoping you would put up a few more screencasts. You have made many changes and tweaks to the site since its launch. This is the part of the redesign that I was most interested in. How do you adjust things to facilitate better user interaction? Any chance on some more videos?
Hi Christ,
Is that all?
I guest you written on the first page saying that 1 more video to come.