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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

Some suggestions for you:

- Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. The main button looks awkward.

- Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if you want to further professionalize this project.

- Add caching for search queries (it took ~ 10sec to calculate 800€ and 100€ which might be some of the most requested price points)

- Add large buttons at the top which show the most sensible price points

- As the others have said, this is easily expandible to other european countries. Add a French / Italian / Swedish version.

- Add some social stuff so people can comment etc

- Take some inspiration from PC parts picker

If you want to talk feel free to shoot me an email.

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- Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap.

Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works. If you pull in a framework for every itch you have to scratch (even as "lightweight" and standardized as Bootstrap), without taking the considerably greater time to actually understand the framework actually works -- you'll likely regret it some day.

Usability-wise, the biggest issues I see are:

- even after we select for English, we still get captions in German.

- in the hover help boxes (that appear over the green "Leistung" bars), all the performance metric (?)names are camelcased; presumably because they are fresh out of some database. These should also be proper names, the way they normally appear out in the wild.

- there's lots of wasted space. The entire result set should fit on one page, with no need for scrolling, if at all possible.

Or just spend an hour or so figuring out how basic styling form styling works.

Should you do that if you don't already know how it works?

Form styling in a responsive, consistent, and cross-browser way is actually pretty tricky, even for an experienced front-end developer!

I totally understand the antipathy for using such frameworks, and I suggest that they're ill-suited to larger projects where you have the resources to solve these problems in a better way. But Bootstrap has it's place, and the clue is in the name.

I second this, particularly if you're a consultant and expect to hand the project off at some point.

I inherited a project that would advance a lot faster if the original developers had used Bootstrap or another CSS framework.

They also chose to use an obscure JavaScript framework instead of Angular or React, so it's impossible to recruit anyone with experience, and you can't take advantage of the plug-in ecosystems.

Should you do that if you don't already know how it works?

This is a tough one. But my general instincts suggest that yes, there are significant benefits to be had from at least getting traction on figuring out how stuff works natively before adopting a framework.

BTW I'm certainly not anti-Bootstrap. It's just that suspect the tipping point in favor of its adoption lies somewhere beyond the threshold of a single form button.

"Don't reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels"

"Don't go for the jetpack when all you need is a bicycle" is more the philosophy I'm trying to express.

But sometimes, that advice actually equates to "don't drive the minivan in your garage. Go out and buy a bicycle."

By the way, do you have any suggestions for tutorials that teach someone a mental model for how CSS/HTML layout works? In particular, I'm looking for a mental model that I can apply consistently and which doesn't feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole. So far I've found that with flexbox, but I'm still finding myself in situations where I need to work with existing block/inline/inline-block code.

Reading the source of popular open source frameworks is a great way to get a sense of how to write maintainable, reusable CSS. Oftentimes it's not actually too confusing behind the scenes because CSS logic is relatively straightforward to begin with.

Other than that, the hard knock school of life is my primary instructor. There's no "Code Complete" for your stylesheets (at least not one that I've found).

Very sadly, I don't. Beyond the Box Model (and the basic notion of "cascading"), there seem to be very few mental models, as such, out there; if anything, people tend to learn through a collection of experiences (many of them negative, at the outset).

Not that there aren't important concepts to understand. Just that the quirks and exceptions tend to rise up from the mists, and -- just when you thought you got a handle on some particular area of functionality -- overwhelm the nice, tidy, conceptual aspects.

Which is why it has proved to be by far the hardest programming environment I've ever hard to learn.

Thanks for showing me these issues.

For what it's worth, I'm conflicted on the whitespace. I see as well that it would be nice to have it all on one page, but that the current design uses whitespace to separate items is something I like. But I'm not saying that the way the price display for example is working is perfect and can't be changed.

For the bootstrap and form styling, I don't think that bootstrap is the answer here. I am capable of building reliable enough css, I just do not know what to change. A framework can give guidance, but I do not know one that implements this specific combined form input properly. Might be that I just do not have enough experience with them to know where to look.

"Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if you want to further professionalize this project."

Can you elaborate a bit? I have the same problem as the original poster. But founding a company requires IHK membership fees and tax consultant fees. From what I hear this amounts to ~ 1500 €/year.

I'd recommend against that. You'll probably be fine as a sole proprietor (Einzelunternehmen).

A separate legal entity (UG / GmbH / Limited / whatever) is mainly useful for three things:

- avoiding personal liability

- shared ownership

- tax optimisation

For a website like this, there is practically no liability to worry about. And if you don't have a partner, you don't need to worry about shared ownership.

For tax purposes, the overhead of a legal entity only pays off if you already have a lot of revenue (in Austria, more than 200k€ per year)

Agree for a website. I'm selling software licenses, avoiding personal liability would be interesting (if it was affordable).

"Limited liability" is mainly related to financial liability (taxes, wages, payments for supplies). If you are worried about your software accidentally deleting all your users files, getting insurance would probably be better than founding a GmbH (and more affordable too).

Interesting - thanks for your answers!

I second that. There is no need to start a UG or GmbH.

Especially not for avoiding personal liability!

Because as the director of the company (which you are as a solo founder), you ARE still personally liable (GmbH-Geschäftsführer-Haftung).

Get a Gewerbeschein. It's 25€ or so. IHK might want membership fees, but they are really low if you don't have much income.

Go with Kleinunternehmerregelung. It makes many things easier if your revenue is below 17,500€ per year.

Don't forget: The first 8,000€ in income per year are tax-free.

Thanks for the insights!

If you create a legal entitiy you will have to pay taxes / IHK (depending on your annual profit) and some tax consultant fees.

But in my eyes the benefit overweights:

- all your business expenses are kept in a professional setting and don't screw with your personal finances

- you will have a separate bank account

- you have a legal entity you can later sell to a real business

- you can use leftover money to (re-)invest into nearby business areas

- you have limited liability (and you can buy proper insurances for your risky business activities!!)

Your local IHK will be happy to guide you through this process.

I also started off as a sole proprietor and moved up the food chain through UG to GmbH(s), and there is so much you will learn during this process. I think every entrepreneur should have experience with local trade laws and taxes, so in my eyes you can't start early enough.

If you have any questions feel free to ping me.

I was thinking in the direction of a limited in the UK, having read that this is the easiest way. Do you have an opinion on that?

I'm a german living in France, the tax situation is already difficult enough, but yeah – I also think it is a good idea to separate any project income and costs from my personal finances

I strongly advise you against forming a limited in the UK. The setup cost might be low but if something unusual happens the fees for expert advice will eat you alive. Furthermore UK Ltd has a very bad reputation in mainland EU because they are used by many people who aren't allowed to form companies in they home countries (e.g. Germany) any more due to previous bancruptcies.

If you do it out of tax reasons and you are willing to take the risk of not being able to do any administrative "things" by going to a local government agency in the town where you live, then form an entity outside of EU for example in singapore.

Again, I'd suggest you start your first steps in business locally where you can talk to actual people. There are a lot of services available that can help you out in person.

Okay. I'll try to get local help. I already got told that France has a system for that I could use, I'll follow up on that.

Also, the German tax office will look at your UK registered company and your dividend payments and artificially lowered salary, and your German tax domicile, then tax you after the fact directly as if no company existed. Single ownership UK Ltd companies are a black flag to the Finanzamt.

My best advice is to walk into the local Finanzamt and speak to someone. I've always found them to be knowledgeable, courteous and genuinely interested in helping. Explain to them your goals (minimising tax liability / indemnity / etc) and they will advise you where they can (for free).

Don't do offshore. It's just a premature optimization. It also does not actually save you money unless you're leaving it outside the country. If you want to spend it in France or Germany, you have to pay taxes on it anyway.

If you ever need a credit or want to sell to businesses, you'll also find out that people don't trust Limiteds. One reason is that traditionally people used them for a fresh start after going bankrupt and being barred from operating a domestic company. It also appears as if ltds attract more than their statistically fair share of douchebags, ruining it for everyone else.

Also, and I know people differ on this, but I kinda think paying taxes isn't the worst thing there is (and is probably a moral obligation). There are also possible downsides from avoiding taxes & social sec contributions, like not having the kind of certificate for your income your next landlord might want, the inability to join public health insurance and the risk of managing all your retirement funds yourself – a friend of mine lost the two million € he had saved in his limited when Royal Bank of Scotland(?) went under.

All of these can be done as sole proprietor (Einzelunternehmer), too.

Bank account: Just go to your bank and create business bank account.

Leftover money: It's up to you how much you withdraw, although you must pay tax on all income minus expenses.

Limited liability is not true (see Geschäftsführerhaftung).

Insurance: Again, you can get insurance (IT-Betriebshaftpflicht) as a sole proprietor too.

I think, if your project is merely ramen-profitable, don't bother about all the organizatorial overhead.

Another downside of a UG/GmbH: More paperwork for taxes etc. (double bookkeeping).

You can form a US corporation for approximately 100-200 per year in most states (California being a notable much more expensive exception.) There is no requirement that you actually live in the US or even visit.

Stripe now has "US incorporation as a service": https://stripe.com/atlas

Could you show me how the main button looks for you? I'm wondering whether its intended design is what you see (certainly possible! If I learned one thing here, then it is that to find a working design that caters to a sufficient high amount of visitors is hard).

Caching of course is already implemented. Is it possible the cache was just stale for you, did the second load also take that much time?

I really like the idea of letting people comment. It would be great to have a small community on the site, as an alternative to only piggy-back on others.

Thanks also for the offer with the email. I might very well take you up on it :)

There are websites that let you preview your website in different browsers and even different countries. I can't remember any but a quick online search should find them.

Check out https://www.browserstack.com/ or if you want to try something without signing up: http://browsershots.org/https://www.pc-kombo.de/

For me it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/MxhVx6Z.png

I have pretty aggressive ad filtering so this might have an effect on how it is displayed :)

Thanks. That's pretty much how it is supposed to look :)

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