[DanielStraight]

I think forcing a PDF download in order to have any idea what you're getting is a mistake. Some sort of HTML preview would be really nice.

I find the configuration of the worksheets somewhat confusing. What do minimum and maximum value mean for reducing fractions? That is completely unclear until generating a few worksheets and seeing what it does, but generating a few worksheets and then tweaking the results is a pain because of the lack of HTML preview.

Some of the sheets seem repetitive. I did 20 reducing fractions problems, and almost all of them had 54 in the numerator.

In regards to design, I think one thing that would really help is having some visual guidance in the form of icons or previews. Instead of tucking the list of available worksheets on the side of the home page, stick it right in the middle and instead of making them normal links, make them big buttons that say what they are and show a preview of the type of problems you can generate. Instead of giving complicated names to the types of problems ("associative multiplying with missing number"??), show a picture of them. Users are going to get frustrated if they have to download a dozen PDFs to finally figure out what kind of worksheets they actually want.

[decadentcactus]

> I think forcing a PDF download in order to have any idea what you're getting is a mistake. Some sort of HTML preview would be really nice.

Second, and it would be helpful to view some demos on the front page. I realised I was going to download some sheets, but what did they look like? Shouldn't be too hard to screenshot a few as demos.

[hh]

The reason why don't use HTML is because HTML cannot show complicate equations and layout without a lot of graphics. We will consider screencast.

[pbhjpbhj]

You could cache the pdf files as they're generated and produce a cropped and reduced size (and watermarked!) PNG file from the images using ImageMagick (or similar) on your server. Dump those PNG to a folder occassionally (eg cron job) and use a "coverflow" style generator (eg http://www.imageflow.nl/ ) to add some panache to the page and show what type of worksheets people are using. If you do I'll bet you get more clicks via the coverflow links than any other route.

Edit: looking again I'd really make an effort to add both a link and a graphical watermark to the free printouts. One upgrade you can offer is to remove the watermark. Another is to add the school name and logo in place of your own. The name/logo (no logo yet?) is _free_ marketing ... headteacher see the worksheet, tells superintendent, informs all teachers in the region ..., etc..

[emmett]

Just include screenshots of a few sample sheets as images; there's no need for a screencast.

[DanielStraight]

Right.

And the idea behind the HTML was the same. It doesn't have to be pretty, just some kind of preview. Giving sample images might remove the problem, but when you're trying to figure out how hard the worksheet is going to be by tweaking the configuration, it'd be nice to just see an instant update of what the problems will look like. You could just show a simple plain text representation of a representative problem based on the current input and that would be very helpful in my mind.

[hh]

Minimum and maximum values allow you to control the difficulty level. You can use default if you don't want to adjust anything.