Show HN: First site I've built, Personalized Makeup site for Beginners

[arethusa]

Hi HN,

This is the first site I've built. I know it probably won't be interesting to most of you but I think it's pretty helpful to people interested in makeup: http://www.savvyist.com

I hope to make it easier for anyone who wants to get started with makeup, as it can be a really useful tool, and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be.

I learned Ruby on Rails to create it using the amazing book/tutorial by Michael Hartl and some good codecademy courses. I was formerly a User Experience Designer at Nokia & didn't know how to code before then. If you want to know more about how I got started, feel free to ask me, I can give you my email address. I would love to meet more female coders in particular!

Hope you like it :)

[viraptor]

Looks great! Can't tell anything about the content really... but for the site itself:

- I like the merged signup/in

- The "try customizing this page" is a bit technical and it's far enough from the following text that I didn't think they were related

- I find the constantly changing faces distracting... maybe a smoother and/or longer transition could help?

- After clicking on one of the guides, I got the top bar and a white page - the main image took so long to load that I thought the page broke. This may just happen on slow connections. (I could scroll down already, but wouldn't know that without looking at the scroll bar)

- The footer with about / story / blog / legal links is not available on the front page - on purpose?

[arethusa]

Thank you so much for checking it out and for the feedback, viraptor!!

- Good point on the "customize this page". I showed it to someone today and they thought it changed the page "skin", like the color of the page. I will muse about how to make it clearer...

- You're right, the transition is quite slow. I think maybe it is jquery being laggy? I'm pretty newb with javascript, I will look into if there are any smoother transitions.

- Lol. That's what I get for being close to a university and having really good connections. I will try to figure out how to make it faster on slow connections.

- For the footer, not on purpose, I just didn't want there to be too many things to take them off the homepage. Also the About/story/ is pretty outdated so I need to update that. I will add it in after I update, since you think it is useful to see early on.

Thank you again for taking the time to check it out, I really appreciate it!

[ddv]

Looks great, especially for your first site.

How long did it take you to learn Ruby/Rails?

Do you have prior software development experience?

[arethusa]

Hi ddv,

Thanks so much for the compliments!

It took me about 2 weeks to go through Michael Hartl's tutorial, https://www.railstutorial.org/. After I had gone through the tutorial, I still didn't fully grasp some fundamentals like what an MVC framework was; I only figured that out as I started building out my site. I still feel like I can't call myself a developer, since I have a poor understanding of things like JSON and asynchronous stuff.

I had taken an intro course a while ago in college; it was on ANT assembly language and C. So I had some understanding of if/then loops and obscure things like pointers, but I had no understanding of web development and how to create something myself. I also had no knowledge of Javascript or CSS beforehand, and little understanding of HTML. I used Codeacademy to learn the basics, and of course the wonderland, Stack Overflow :)

My next goal is to learn how to create an app, but I haven't found any good resources for that yet.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[marvel_boy]

Really nice portal. From the design point is quite good, the backgorund palette of colors contrast nicely with the makeup photos. Don't worry too much about technical details, design layout is what clients see on first spot. And your design is quite good !

[arethusa]

Thanks marvel_boy :) I appreciate it!!!

[zz1]

Clickable: http://www.savvyist.com

[arethusa]

Thank you :)