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Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

tuvalie.com

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Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#21

Post by tuvalie »

s_kilk wrote: post #19
tuvalie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, eric. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind me asking, do you think it feels that way because of the color choices, spacing, order of content, or something else? The colors are tied to specific themes, which can be changed by registered users -- but I can still tweak the default theme if it would improve things.

(not eric, but had the same thought) Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font, the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI. The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up in your face and shouts the content at you. Concrete suggestions: - dial down the font size - put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if possible). - maybe…

Thank you! I'm going to work through those suggestions later. Do you mind if I ask for your feedback afterwards?

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#22

Post by s_kilk »

tuvalie wrote: post #21
s_kilk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not eric, but had the same thought) Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font, the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI. The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up in your face and shouts the content at you. Concrete suggestions: - dial down the font size - put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if possible). - maybe…

Thank you! I'm going to work through those suggestions later. Do you mind if I ask for your feedback afterwards?

Sure, go for it :)

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#23

Post by techaddict009 »

Information looks good. Design looks a bit old doesnt affect anyway but I would recommend updating it. SEO of the site is worse.

What is the plan for revenue? contextual advertisement? Donation? Or something else?

I would love to collaborate and help in UI/UX and SEO. Ping me if you wish to connect: vivek@eyuva.com

Recent work: oizom.com, metavideos.com

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#24

Post by tuvalie »

techaddict009 wrote: post #23

Information looks good. Design looks a bit old doesnt affect anyway but I would recommend updating it. SEO of the site is worse. What is the plan for revenue? contextual advertisement? Donation? Or something else? I would love to collaborate and help in UI/UX and SEO. Ping me if you wish to connect: vivek@eyuva.com Recent work: oizom.com, metavideos.com

Hi. Thanks for the feedback. If I can help it, I don't want any advertising to touch the knowledge functions of the site. It's part of a larger project that offers subscription services and sponsorships for interest communities, so all of this is just one piece to that puzzle. Donations would be wonderful, but I don't really see getting a lot of them. If nothing else, I still love building this stuff. I've been at it for several years and my interest level hasn't diminished at all, so I have that going for me!

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#25

Post by lucaspiller »

s_kilk wrote: post #19
tuvalie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, eric. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind me asking, do you think it feels that way because of the color choices, spacing, order of content, or something else? The colors are tied to specific themes, which can be changed by registered users -- but I can still tweak the default theme if it would improve things.

(not eric, but had the same thought) Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font, the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI. The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up in your face and shouts the content at you. Concrete suggestions: - dial down the font size - put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if possible). - maybe…

> Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way

I'd also recommend getting rid of the icons on the main menu and replacing them with text (with a small icon next to them if you must). I had to hover over the icons to figure out what they do.

This is one of the things I like about Bootstrap, as a developer I can now focus on building stuff without having to care about making it look nice (which I'm not good at). I just add Bootstrap and for 90% of things (I usually do business web apps) that's good enough.

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#26

Post by pmontra »

xjay wrote: post #15

I don't have a comment on the work itself, but like most sites, it has no awareness of line length, and it's therefore painful to parse the information without resizing the window. Both HN, and the linked website, could benefit greatly in readability by simply limiting line-length to ~32em for textual information. It's strange that a browser, designed for human use, has no notion of humans in that regard.

I'd say that resizing windows to make text readable should be normal and using maximized windows on todays large displays makes little sense, but... I was looking at that site myself on a maximized window :-) Why? Because I had other tabs open with developer tools and I needed all the space. So yes, sites should set line length and line spacing appropriately. When we see lot of white space around a column of text we should know that our window is too large. By the way, there are CSS multi column properties to fix that

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns...

https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/

It's supported by all browsers. Funnily IE leads the way here, the other browsers require vendor prefixes.

http://caniuse.com/multicolumn

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#29

Post by mark_l_watson »

Nicely done! I especially like the timeline. Most of the data for the search results I tried are available via DBPedia and other sources and you did a great job tying it all together.

BTW, re: UI: I found it easy to use, and it looked nice, on the iPad Pro I am using right now. It is kind of people here to offer suggestions for improving the UI, but my suggestion is to leave the UI as is and keep working on the back end stuff

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#30

Post by eric001 »

tuvalie wrote: post #14
eric001 wrote: post #13

Regarding the UI, personally, I would shrink things down a notch. It feels a bit "in your face" right now, if that makes sense. Besides that - love it! Edit: even just changing font-size from 14pt to 11pt is much better imho.

Hi, eric. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind me asking, do you think it feels that way because of the color choices, spacing, order of content, or something else? The colors are tied to specific themes, which can be changed by registered users -- but I can still tweak the default theme if it would improve things.

Hi!

Here's just a quick comparison between your version and a version where I changed some small things. http://imgur.com/a/w1bUV

font-size 11pt body width 80%, margin: 0 auto; header height 40px and header > img 35x35px.

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