Learn Web Design, Web Development, and iOS Development - Treehouse

http://teamtreehouse.com/

by jseifer • 15 years ago

589 175 15 years ago

teamtreehouse.com

GiraffeNecktie• 15 years ago

Any relation to the Treehouse Agency?

jseifer• 15 years ago

Nope, no relation that I know of.

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

That is correct.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Soooo excited to launch this :) Would love to hear your feedback.

sabat• 15 years ago

I like it already, and am already working on the xcode badge. Curious: what's the business model?

undone• 15 years ago

+1 - Very curious how they plan on turning this around, with a good amount of employees, hired teachers, and 6 investors.

Either way, a great idea looking forward to seeing more material soon!

danmaz742• 15 years ago

That's exactly the first question that came to my mind. When I don't see a "plans and pricing" link, I always start wondering where's the catch.

danberger2• 15 years ago

Based on this competition [1] it seems that their business model is different subscription packages. The Gold package, for example, is supposedly $588 per year.

[1] http://thinkvitamin.com/asides/guess-this-badge-and-win-a-fr...

shade• 15 years ago

Congrats on the launch, very nice looking site.

Just wanted to take a moment and thank you for the attention to detail in that you included closed captioning for the sample videos on the site -- it's something I rarely expect to see and I'm always very pleasantly surprised when it's there. Is that something that'll be carrying over to the rest of the videos on the site?

rookadook• 15 years ago

Looks fantastic! Balances education, accomplishments and ease of use perfectly. Well done.

ramitos• 15 years ago

It looks awesome.

rubymaverick• 15 years ago

Congrats guys. Way to represent Orlando!

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks! You don't have to be in Silicon Valley :)

vladsanchez2• 15 years ago

Ryan,

I've followed you for a while on Think Vitamin and some of the DocType guys (Nick and Jim) and I never imagined you were in Orlando too!

Makes me very proud!

Congrats.

-Vlad

riffic• 15 years ago

Agree, very surprised to see this come out of Orlando. Very impressed as well.

Can't wait to get started.

rkalla3• 15 years ago

Feedback:

Have no idea what Treehouse is, clicked the site, took 300ms to look at the 3 giant buttons.

Clicked "web design" (the site looks very nice BTW)

... and started learning about web design.

Watched the first video, hit the only button "Let's Go" and found a collection of other videos to get me further down the path of web design, letting me skip directly to my problems areas instead of grinding through things I know.

Conclusion: Without ever knowing what you guys do, what the site is or how to use it "correctly" I was able to start learning in what was less than probably 3 seconds of thinking.

I still don't know what you guys do or what the plan here is (heading back to read more) but your flow is perfect.

Like abnormally simple and wonderful... really nice job.

khill• 15 years ago

I totally agree with your point. However, unlike you, I didn't click on anything because (a) my time is valuable and I can't waste it on a site which may not provide value to me and (b) I don't trust web sites which don't explicitly tell me what they do or have an obvious "About" link on the home page.

Please add a sentence or two at the top of the page to tell me your target audience and why I should use the site.

danberger2• 15 years ago

It distinctly asks at the top "What do you want to learn today?" and then gives you three options: Web Design, Web Development, or iOS (btw, it should say iOS Development not just iOS). That's enough to make any user realize they're a site that helps you learn these things.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We added the About page on the top nav (last second) but it broke the responsive layout. It's now at the bottom and we'll put it back up top when we can.

scottschulthess3• 15 years ago

+1 I was also confused in the same way. The homepage is good at getting you started using the stuff quickly, but I wanted an overview of exactly what it was first

pgroves• 15 years ago

I did click on "learn web design" and was taken to a video with no description. I turned it off after a few seconds of pleasantries (eg. "Don't worry if you're totally new to web design"). I really think you guys should consider putting a course outline up front so users can know the scope of what they're getting into in a few seconds of skimming text instead of having to watch the whole first video. I don't even know how long that first video was, it didn't have a 'play bar' at the bottom. There's a big difference between a 30 second intro and an hour long 'first lecture'.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

You just made my day. We worked hard on the on-boarding UX.

rkalla3• 15 years ago

Ryan, it really shows.

There is this shallow navigation depth to everything interesting; I don't have to hunt. Very clearly demarcated signs everywhere indicating where you can go and what you'll get.

Topping all of that off is that the actual design/typography of the site is calm, easy on the eyes and attractive.

Woost• 15 years ago

One minor issue: On windows XP/FF 3.6 the font is a little hard to read: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/543/201111041105.png/

I'm not sure exactly what firefox is trying to do (since both IE 8 and chrome are better), but I thought I'd let you guys know.

buss• 15 years ago

The UX is great, I agree, but I can't stand how you put emphasis on every other word in the web design intro video.

It reminded me of an Ira Glass segment where he talked about his early radio career (See http://transom.org/?p=6978 and scroll down to "1. Learning Curve"). He also made this mistake, to the detriment of the story.

Please fix this when you have time. Maybe consider hiring a professional actor to read the script in a more natural way.

skat_et_dieu2• 15 years ago

You guys can market the web development videos for webOS devs also since webOS uses web languages for development.

BrainScraps2• 15 years ago

Can you guys hook it up with some student discounts?

skadamat2• 15 years ago

Agree with everything above!

I was worried I was going to have to pay for the iOS videos but boy was I wrong - and I'm glad, I'm just a college student ><.

I really like the iOS intro video, y'all really put some time into making them, with the white backdrops and all.

And yeah the website has a really simple, amazing UX!

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Cheers! Feels great to get it out in to the wild :)

jabkobob• 15 years ago

I didn't have such a flawless experience. I was first baffled because I didn't understand what kind of website that is. I thought, well doesn't matter, it looks nice, let's try iOS. Then I watched that intro video that promised a first look at Objective C. I clicked "Lets go" and ended up at an XCode tutorial. Huh? So I clicked the breadcrumb navigation, and thought "App Life Cycle" sounds interesting. I clicked that. I started watching the video, but after 30 seconds the video suddenly stopped. Underneath it says the video takes 7 minutes. Well, obviously somethings wrong. I looked around, and saw something about signing up and unlocking badges, and I thought, hmm, I just want to watch the rest of this video, I don't want to bother unlocking any badges, so I gave up, went back to hacker news, and wrote this rant.

chuinard• 15 years ago

I also had a similar unfortunate fate with the iOS tutorials. I was excited clicking "Let's Go", and I spent 8 minutes familiarizing myself with Xcode. Then, I didn't get anything to further me - just something about a quiz, which honestly I don't care to take right now this early, and then a video on Interface Builder and Editor and Utilities Area.

I know what IB is, but for a lot of other people, they probably won't even want to click it, and Editor and Utilities Area sounds kind of boring. Clicking around more, it seems like there are specific categories now - Xcode is just one of them. I thought I was going to learn how to build an iPhone app, but now I have to figure out the right subtopic.

Overall, not a good experience. I think it's a great design in terms of colors and such (and even the video page I watched was nice and simple), but the flow was terrible. To top it all off, iOS 4 Foundations is the name of the iOS page. This barely sounds relevant to a newcomer, I would rather see that say 'iOS Development'. Foundations sounds like it'll go through boring stuff, I really just wanted to start hacking away at apps.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks for the feedback

stupandaus• 15 years ago

Seems really interesting. What differentiates Treehouse from Code Academy?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

1. They're just focusing on coding, whereas we're covering the whole landscape: Design and Development (and some Business topics to help people launch startups). We've launched with a large library of topics (HTML, CSS, CSS3, HTML5, iOS 4, Design Foundations, Introduction to Programming, and more), compared to their single topic (JavaScript).

2. They're crowd-sourcing their courses. We've hired full-time Expert Teachers who are carefully crafting courses and editorializing content so Treehouse Members know what order they should learn things in.

3. we're already profitable because we're charging for the product. I think their angle is to sell access to their users for people looking to hire, but I'm not sure.

RegEx• 15 years ago

Has any progress been made with Codecademy? I still only see three JavaScript courses. Has no one contributed to the lessons?

andrewparker• 15 years ago

I contributed a lesson to Codecademy that just went live today on the DOM and jQuery: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/jquery-and-the-dom

bsenftner• 15 years ago

So, you guys just launched... are those testimonials made up?

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

Treehouse used to be called Think Vitamin Membership. It's been around for about a year and a half, and the testimonials are from current customers.

level09• 15 years ago

this is actually a migration from ThinkVitamin.com old website ..

viggity• 15 years ago

looks nice, minor suggestion - some of the fonts look like hell on XP/Chrome and they're very hard to read. Congrats on launch

layzphil• 15 years ago

Yeah top right nav links look horrible for me in Win7/Chrome, as do the testimonials at the bottom.

sirclueless• 15 years ago

Seconded, also on Win7/Chrome and http://i.imgur.com/XSfw7.png is what I get. I've seen this font in use several places on the web (some popular tumblr themes use it) and it always looks horrible.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

This looks amazing, and I'll be signing up immediately when I arrive home from work today. Really great job, and congrats on launching.

My only question thus far: Is there an easy way for me to be informed when new badges/topics/videos are available? Either a digest email or some sort of RSS feed that I could customize based on personal interests would be fantastic.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks for the kind words. On the Library page we list the new badges, but you're right. Not super easy for you. We should hook that up to the @treehouse account.

ChrisAnn2• 15 years ago

Please add subtitles to the videos. I don't always watch with sound and would like to be able to read as I go along.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Hi Chris. Great news! We already have Captions. If you see any videos that don't have them, could you please email us and we'll take care of it: help@teamtreehouse.com

Gracias

ChrisAnn2• 15 years ago

That's good news.

The Introduction to Development video does not currently have them and I haven't really poked around at other videos.

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

Subtitles should be available on all videos when viewed on the website. Any videos without subtitles are currently being subtitled currently and should show up soon.

robinduckett• 15 years ago

Feedback number deux:

1. From first glance this is an education website

2. No free tier, so you can't actually take any of the quizes without paying at least $25.

3. This is when I closed the tab

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We think it's a good idea to charge for products (generally). I know it's not hip, but revenue and profitability allow us to ...

1) Provide very high quality education because we can afford to hire full-time Teachers, instead of crowd-sourcing the curriculum

2) Be profitable, so we can stay in business and continue to grow the service, which benefits our Members

scottschulthess3• 15 years ago

I agree, it's good that you guys are charging from day 1

ceol• 15 years ago

Would you guys be willing to do something like a Bronze plan, where maybe you get access to the videos but no offline viewing? I'd love to pay something like $10-$15/mo for the most basic access.

Also, I'd like to toss in my obligatory "Awesome job with the design!" comment.

voxmatt• 15 years ago

This is great. I've been watching things like codecademy get tons of buzz and quietly thought: has no one been over to Think Vitamin Membership? I think this rebranding is a great idea and the new design is wonderful. Now add in some of that fancy interactive-in-browser-coding/learning and you'd be unstoppable (not that the more in-depth stuff should be done this way, but it's a really compelling and addictive hook).

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

We have added Code Challenges, that allow you to demonstrate your knowledge using real code in the browser to learn badges.

systemtrigger• 15 years ago

Smart design, quality video production and badges. Treehouse looks solid. Good luck!

Maro• 15 years ago

Dislaimer: I'm not the target audience.

Looks good. $25/mo seems too much. Can't take any sample tests without paying $25.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We're hoping to make a couple Code Challenges and Quizzes public soon. Couldn't finish it for launch.

BvS• 15 years ago

I would also love to take a sample test (or a 1 day free trial or something) so I can get an idea if it's righ for me before paying 25US$.

Looks awesome though!

vijayr• 15 years ago

May be you could keep the 25$ at the beginning, then give discount to those who unlock badges? say 15$ if you unlock 10 badges, or something like that?

nicholask• 15 years ago

Can I ask, are you $25/mo. with the option to 'drop out' at any time, and I get to keep video's I've downloaded?

Also, my opinion is $25/mo. is reasonable for access to your videos. Congrats on your launch!

scottschulthess3• 15 years ago

Great site; I would appreciate a bit more language on the homepage about what exactly it does and how it works.

Something like "Treehouse is a ...." what? An interactive subscription based learning platform? A online classroom? Whatever you want to call it but it took me a while to figure out

1. What is it

2. What can I do for free vs what do I need to pay for?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Our preference was to get you immediately in to the product, instead of trying to sell you the product.

tomwalsham2• 15 years ago

I'm interested in why you'd go with 'Treehouse' as the name considering the trademark space for educational content is already pretty cluttered for that term. Was this considered and dismissed?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

There is a bit of clutter, in the traditional education space. However, there wasn't anything with a good online presence, so we thought it was a great name.

Not going to be able to buy treehouse.com for awhile though, as they want $1m for it.

tomwalsham2• 15 years ago

I was more angling at whether you're concerned about litigation/C&D from existing players defending their TM. It's a great name, but potentially provides an unwanted complication down the line.

Tichy• 15 years ago

As a non-native speaker I wonder what is the relationship between "treehouse" and learning? Except that treehouses are typically being built by kids and kids usually go to school?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We chose it because people generally have good feelings towards Treehouses. Also, they're a place of wonder and fun. Finally, there wasn't anything already established with that name.

Antelope• 15 years ago

Impressed that they also have a beautifully-optimized mobile site as well upon launch. Shows a laudable attention to detail.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Cheers. We worked hard on the Responsive Layout

driverdan• 15 years ago

"Watch videos and take tests"

Am I missing something? That's your learning method? Nothing interactive? No coding? Videos may be a fine way of understanding a process but it's not good for something as in-depth as coding. You don't learn code by watching videos of others doing it, you learn by coding.

The site design is nice but you'd need to offer a lot more than videos to get me to sign up.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We have something called Code Challenges. They require you to code (using an in-browser engine) and pass challenges.

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

Several of the videos include Code Challenges, which test your knowledge by writing real code in the browser. We are going to be expanding this tool throughout Treehouse to offer more opportunities to code-along as well as take challenges.

breathesalt• 15 years ago

I think this site is targeting the youtube generation--nothing wrong with that. I personally would prefer to see higher caliber technical books enter the market. However, it seems the acclaim here concerns more the site design than the service itself.

WilhelmJ• 15 years ago

The site looks great and very user friendly, but as others have pointed out, the paid-tier-only seems too restrictive. Specially given the motto of treehouse is "Millions of people can't afford a quality technical education, or if they can, it's out of date immediately when they graduate. We aim to change that."

How can this compare to MIT (and other) Open Course Work and hundreds if not thousands of good free tutorials on the internet Vs $25/$49 a month?

FWIW, I learned basics of web development/design totally free, just took a bit of searching to find good resources, and once I was confortable with basics, the further education came through just googling-on-demand, videos only helped in the beginning.

jimrhoskins8• 15 years ago

I too learned Dev and Design through free resources and googling (It's still how I learn), but a lot of people find value in having a path laid out to them, and having consistency in the resources they learn from.

Of course a lot of people on HN are going to be people who taught/teach themselves everything, but a lot of people want some hand holding, and that's what we aim to provide with Treehouse.

apsurd• 15 years ago

Interesting that you say a lot of people want hand-holding - I agree.

But don't you think in an industry like software development, you need to be able to self-educate. Software just moves too fast. So a person that needs hand-holding is not going to "get" what it takes to be a good programmer.

Do you disagree?

tnorthcutt• 15 years ago

Congrats on the (re)launch! I used ThinkVitamin a little bit earlier this year, and it's great to see you guys moving forward. It wasn't for me at the time, but may be in the future. I don't know if it was just the timing (I was really busy) or the format (video isn't for everyone), but I was impressed with the product regardless.

One thing to note on the new site: clicking "Sign your team up" on this page: http://teamtreehouse.com/groups just takes you back to this page: https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans, where clicking on "Sign up" takes you to a page with no indication of how to sign up for a group plan.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out. We're working on a brand new Groups product that will come out in one month. It'll have a custom signup process.

For now, the way Groups sign up is like this: Sign up and then add "sub-users". It's not elegant, but it works for now. Then in a month, we'll launch something super sweet.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

One thing I forgot to mention: Wordpress/Automattic, Living Social, and BankSimple are going to be interviewing Treehouse members who are looking for work and have unlocked certain badges. We'll contact Members who qualify.

rkalla3• 15 years ago

This is a brilliant marketing campaign for Treehouse -- "come use us and we'll get you a great job!"

+50 on this launch guys.

Casc• 15 years ago

Ryan,

I think that may be your biggest sell in this community. I didn't realize that at ALL when I checked out your site. I actually left thinking "eh, I'll just stick to openclassroom/courseware"... Knowing this really adds a whole new world of appeal. Incorporate that somehow!!

juliano_q• 15 years ago

Any chance of launching an Android Development course? Treehouse seems to be exactly what I was looking for, but the topic that I am really interested in at this moment is not there.

Congrats for the product, the site is amazing and I enjoyed the free videos a lot.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

It's in the pipeline. Thanks for the kind words :)

tryitnow2• 15 years ago

so glad to here this. I am curious how you decide which courses are worth pursuing and which aren't.

My guess is that it would be useful to review job sites and see which skills are in demand relative to some estimate of the supply of those skills.

I really hope this is the future of education - college is such a waste of time/money for learning practical skills.

fotoblur• 15 years ago

Site looks amazing...however the fonts on Windows are hard to read and are jagged, especially in the testimonials section. I'm sure they look great on my MacBook but don't forget the Windows crowd when designing (Test case: Vista with Chrome and FF).

Good luck with the venture. I am a firm believer that online education in software development is going to be big in the coming years. Get recruiters to start using your service to weed out recruits ;)!

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. We're currently working on the PC font issue.

jinp6301• 15 years ago

Hey guys! Great website design. I was wondering if there was a student pricing option. $49 a month is really really steep for a poor grad student and I would really like the project videos as well as the standard videos.

skadamat2• 15 years ago

Double that!

I'm a student as well that is just interested in learning iOS, not necessarily even to get a job.

I know you guys have put a lot of time into these tutorials and are looking to profit from them, but I think having a student plan would be helpful for us and for you!

I think 10-15 dollars a month is reasonable, maybe 20 dollars a month tops for a student pricing plan.

brianbreslin• 15 years ago

Now there are two coding e-schools out of Orlando. This and envy labs codeschool.com

dhconnelly• 15 years ago

Looks totally awesome. Not related to the product: I think different testimonials would sell this better. You guys aren't (or shouldn't be) competing with universities, which have a completely different mission.

bgramer2• 15 years ago

If the Treehouse folks are reading this, can they please add closed captions/subtitles to their videos? Lynda.com has captions and it has made the difference for me.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We have captions on all our videos actually. Can you see the 'cc' button on the video player (on the site)?

bgramer2• 15 years ago

Sorry, I meant to say the onboarding videos, but I spoke too soon. I just looked at the HTML video and it is indeed captioned, it might be a nice idea to put in a small blurb somewhere saying the lesson videos are captioned.

MANY thanks for doing this. CC is a big deal and helps more people than it gets credit for. I really do appreciate that you included it!

metafour• 15 years ago

Is there an estimate as to when the iOS development videos will be expanded to include iOS 5?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Aiming for a month

snow_mac• 15 years ago

How much will it cost to see all the videos?

jcizzle• 15 years ago

Given that APIs, especially for iOS and Android, are evolving so quickly that your videos are already out of date, what is your plan for shooting new videos when content changes? Won't it be difficult to maintain the same professional editing and keep up with the changes for the given platform?

For example, the big players in iOS education (Big Nerd Ranch, Pragmatic) have been teaching iOS 5 since it was in beta; but you guys are on iOS 4.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Fair comment. The good news though, is that we're releasing new video every week and constantly updating current content. If something becomes outdated, we'll archive it for reference but focus on doing new video on the latest versions.

cstefanovici2• 15 years ago

This is a repackaging of the thinkvitamin website from Carsonified. These are literally the same videos I already downloaded from ThinkVitamin. Same talking heads, same, same...

cstefanovici2• 15 years ago

RYAN CARSON this is lame in that its an expensive version of http://www.codecademy.com

Also you are using the same videos from ThinkVitamin which provide good introductory knowledge and that's it.

Codeacademy makes you actually code and had badges long before you guys.

whyleyc• 15 years ago

This is akin to greeting Google's launch with:

"LARRY PAGE this is lame in that it's a crummy featureless version of http://www.yahoo.com

You are using the same internet to search on.

Yahoo makes you actually log into a nice portal and had search capability long before you guys."

Just because there's a competing product in the marketplace doesn't devalue what Ryan's doing here.

In fact, I think Treehouse is already outstripping Codeacademy on breath of education and video quality.

vladsanchez2• 15 years ago

It's like saying CODEACADEMY is lame because its an expensive version of http://www.lynda.com or http://www.showmedo.com . Get a life dude!

nhangen3• 15 years ago

Actually, I think Codecademy used badges after Rails for Zombies did...so everyone must be copying Greg and crew right?

Who cares...no one really cares about badges anyway...except of course, VC's, who are already out of touch.

apechai• 15 years ago

tryruby had the in-browser coding before codecademy. I'm pretty sure codecademy uses the jq-console plug in which was around before: https://github.com/replit/jq-console

Badges have been around in video games and educational games for a while and Rails for Zombies already used them.

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We've added a lot of new content that wasn't on Think Vitamin Membership. However, yes, all the older content from Think Vitamin Membership has been retained in the Archive. It's still valuable so we didn't want to throw it away.

danso• 15 years ago

I haven't watched any of the videos (as I'm at work) but I love that there are lists of the subtopics: http://teamtreehouse.com/library/design-foundations/html/tex...

I'm always looking for tutorials to send to colleagues/friends who need an easy-entry into the basics, and it helps to know what topics are covered and how you've decided to organize/separate them. My main suggestion would be to include the subtopics on this page, or at least have a button that reveals them all: http://teamtreehouse.com/library/design-foundations/html

The page is already a long scroll...having the list of subtopics, IMO, would be more helpful than detrimental.

Ecio782• 15 years ago

I have a strange behaviour: I cant see the videos on Chromium/Linux Mint 11 while they work in Firefox/Linux Mint 11 on the same laptop, but they were ok on my Chrome/XP office computer. Any idea?

ryancarson40• 15 years ago

I'm afraid we're not officially supporting Linux, so we've done zero testing on the platform. I'm sorry.

plinio_silva• 15 years ago

Same thing here, the videos never start. Using firefox 3.6.16 with flash 10 on linux.

Ecio782• 15 years ago

FF7 with Flash 10 is ok, unfortunately I tend to use Chrom

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eigenvector• 15 years ago

So the operators of a web dev education site apparently don't know enough themselves to at least look at their website on Windows before launching?

Hint: if you are trying to sell stuff, it's probably best to reach out to the widest possible customer base. I can see no business reason to target Mac/Linux users only.

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xenophanes• 15 years ago

Consider adding a feature to view the videos at higher playback speeds.

Even someone who is only comfortable at 1.1x (not hard) could save hours of their time if they like your site.

(I watch TV at 2x generally, huge time saver.)

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion. Good news, it's already on the product roadmap1 :)

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AdamTReineke• 15 years ago

I've been watching math lectures at between 1.5 and 2x because the teacher... talks... so... slowly, but I hadn't thought about speeding up TV. Too bad Netflix doesn't have that option.

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vlokshin• 15 years ago

this is something I absolutely LOVED about Lynda

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WillyF• 15 years ago

Feedback: The "Treehouse Profile URL" field on the sign up page is very unclear. I assumed you wanted a URL of my site to put in my profile, when it looks like you want a username to put in the url to my profile.

Also, when I select PayPal as a payment method, you should hide the credit card fields. It's confusing to click the button when I have a required field showing that doesn't need to be filled out.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

Thanks Willy - we'll try to clear that up.

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coryl• 15 years ago

This is fantastic because its high quality!

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jmilloy• 15 years ago

Loving this. It's very inviting.

One small thing - I think the badge map would be more informative and interesting if it had some sort of labels.

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brown9-22• 15 years ago

Agreed, the page feels very undone. No real content besides the image, which is really calling out for more information if you click on it.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

That's because it's not done :) We just added a static image for launch (MVP). We'll be adding an interactive version of the Badge Map as soon as we can.

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ya3r2• 15 years ago

The only problem I have with this is the video player:

Videos don't look good when not in full screen mode.

When you click the full screen button (bottom right corner), it doesn't go to full screen mode. It shows you another button on top right corner which you must click to go into full screen mode.

In full screen mode, videos look good but, there are no controls beside the pause button.

BTW, everything else seems right with this site.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

I think you're seeing a bug. Do you have time to send an email to help@teamtreehouse.com with a screenshot? Thanks so much.

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ya3r2• 15 years ago

I sent you screenshots.

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bigethan• 15 years ago

You say "Companies like these trust Treehouse" Does that mean those companies (citrix, BBC, Virgin) are using Treehouse, or companies similar to them are using Treehouse.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

They're customers of Treehouse

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kapilkale• 15 years ago

Mike Kus' fingerprints are all over the visuals. Really exceptional work on the design.

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pook1e• 15 years ago

This is amazing. One click from the homepage and I was ready to learn about iOS development. It's very evident that you guys have put a lot of work into making a great UX. Keep up the great work!

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fasouto• 15 years ago

Cool design and good quality videos, nice product!

but IMHO the Badge map is confusing. When I click a badge I expect to be redirected to the page of each badge, not to a full size image of all of them.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

This is just a temp fix until we can create the Badge Map in HTML/CSS/JS

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jinfiesto• 15 years ago

I'm a big fan of Ryan Carson. The sites really cool. The fonts in the intro videos bother me though. Museo in particular looks really ugly for whatever reason.

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jenius• 15 years ago

Also agree with this - I really do not like museo with text shadow on the web

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wasd2• 15 years ago

Hey Ryan, great website. I would really like to try your product but its completely out of my price range (I'm a student). I was wondering if there was any chance I could provide you something in exchange for a discounted rate. Say, testing, feedback, or anything in that nature.

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We're going to be launching a student plan in the very near future

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wasd2• 15 years ago

Thanks! Anyway I can get on some sort of email list?

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skat_et_dieu2• 15 years ago

This is awesome. I'm a long time webOS fan but I'm no where skilled with web languages to develop for webOS but this will surely help me a lot.

I just got an iPhone due to lack of webOS devices and my inner geek wants to learn how iOS development works and this made my day to find iOS learning videos!

Thanks for the amazing website!!

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JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Looks like you use the video tag, but only support MP4, not WebM. You also don't have any fallback indicating the problem, just a big black region where a video should appear. And, attempting to dig out the URL for the MP4 video and access it directly produces an "access denied".

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phatbyte• 15 years ago

Amazing website. I will definitely subscribe as soon as you upgrade to iOS5. Keep up the good work, and shift to iOS5 soon.

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OoTheNigerian• 15 years ago

The videos takes forever to load for me.

I have sent an email.

Awesome Job!

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baby• 15 years ago

That would be useful to me. Waow it's pretty nice. Color theory I'm going to watch that. What I got to sign up? Well it seems like professional content so I'll sign up quickly. Oh I have to pay? Hahah forget that, so many free resource on internet, feels like I'm going back 10 years ago when I had to pay for an encyclopedia or a research engine :)

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snaveint• 15 years ago

Beautiful site, great UX.

I will be signing up and if the videos are as good as the samples I'll definitely be sticking around; worth $49 a month for sure. I love that you guys are trying to tackle this end-to-end - ambitious, but I hope you pull it off.

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IT-noob• 15 years ago

Im not a IT pro but im following Hackernews for a while. I think this is something i searched for the weekends and evenings to learn some new things on web development and basic programming. Great website i really appreciate it.

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spacefungus• 15 years ago

Great execution. I wish there was like a $10/month option though! Or student discounts or something...

But the content is well worth the $25/month and up. Loved ThinkVitamin Membership, this looks even better.

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Caballera• 15 years ago

Looks great. I would be very interested in seeing a Android Dev category.

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capex• 15 years ago

Your knowledge map needs some work. I'd say Khan Academy's knowledge map rocks: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard?k

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sarperdag• 15 years ago

Always admired Ryan Carson's work. Awesome job out there.

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nhangen3• 15 years ago

Like the new layout so far, though I loved the old one just fine too (customer here), but my big question is: where's the affiliate program? Did you can it?

We were just starting to pick up steam on our campaigns.

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estel• 15 years ago

I just subscribed and...

I feel so wary if you aren't asking for my CVV or Billing credentials. Why do banks even allow you to bill without those details using only CC# and Expiry Date? It feels more than a little suspect and weird (though I know that this isn't the case here for you).

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hyperberry• 15 years ago

I really like the simple UX, although I believe others have already provided some good suggestions for improvement.

I'm among the group of visitors who wants to know more before I click any of the big 3 icons. I'm also interested in improving (and adding to) my novice HTML/CSS skills, so I immediately saw value after reading the home page. It came as quite a shock you wanted $50/month to access your full content!

You may want to take this chance to consider a different $ model. Sure, you have plenty of competition- including big name universities- charging way more for effectively the same training. But free substitutes abound. The internet is flooded with tutorials, etc. about how to make stuff for the internet. No matter how much "better" quality you provide, I think prospects will balk at your rates and turn to free resources instead.

But you might still make a lot of money from providing your content "for free". If you only granted access to registered subscribers, you have a great tool for building a strong email list. The demographic has already identified itself: these are people interested in learning more about web & iOS development. There's a lot of cash to be had marketing software tools, templates and all sorts of tertiary materials to this same demo. Imagine the affiliate commission on 1 copy of Adobe CS5.

Also, I found it annoying the "Sign your team up" button on the http://teamtreehouse.com/groups page simply looped back to the main 'Plans' page. Seemed like a mistake when I first clicked; only realized it was intentional after scouring the Plans page to find out "you can easily add other users at a discount". But what are the multi-seat rates?

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

We're always going to charge for our content, because great content is expensive to create. In addition to this, the real value we offer is in guiding our Members through the process of learning and showing them in what order they should learn topics.

The "Sign your team up" link isn't finished yet. Apologies for that.

The pricing is $19/mo for Silver sub-users and $39/mo for Gold sub-users.

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ketchupy2• 15 years ago

Opera (11.52) user here. Video goes black after clicking play. Awesome site, though.

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ketchupy2• 15 years ago

Edit: it's okay now!

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CHsurfer2• 15 years ago

This site gives me the impression that after successfully completing the course I will be able to be hired as a developer. Assuming that I pick up the concepts and can apply them - is this reasonable? My gut tells me no, but I'm not in the business.

At night (and in the early mornings and sometimes at lunch...) I have been teaching myself to program Rails apps. I use books to learn concepts (and RailsCasts too) and I rely on Google and Stack Overflow for problem solving when I get stuck.

I have learned a ton, not only about the language but also about good programming practices. For the latter, I tend to first learn the concept from a book, but only internalize it after having suffered some pain which could have been avoided if I had been using that particular practice. So far I would include orthogonality, version control, testing and asynchronously running processes which I don't control to this list. Behavior Driven Development is also now starting seem like a real benefit and not just overhead so I will try that with my next feature addition.

I guess my question is, how far down the road does one have to go before they could be considered as a potential employee?

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ryancarson40• 15 years ago

The companies we're partnering with (Living Social, WordPress/Automattic and Bank Simple) will tell us they want to look at folks who meet certain criteria, like this:

1. Looking for a job 2. Have unlocked these badges (as an example): 2a. UX Foundations 2b. Ruby Foundations 2c. Rails Foundations 3c. Node.js Foundations

Then we'll present them with those people and they'll choose if they want to approach those folks to interview

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CHsurfer2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the clarification - it helps a lot.

I have to admit that you seem to be offering more value than I realized.

Kudos.

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potential• 15 years ago

Hi Ryan, I'm really interested in this but are there courses/badges aimed at intermediate and advanced users? If so do these become unlocked? It wasn't clear to me how much depth a certain topic gets covered. For example it would be great if you showed what's 'coming soon' or what you intend to cover at http://teamtreehouse.com/library

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