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Ask HN: Please review my website

mathmaster.org

20 pointshh28 comments

The <a href="http://www.mathmaster.org">Mathmaster.org</a> is a free resource for teachers and parents. You can make an unlimited number of printable math worksheets for children, for the classroom or for homework practice.

Thank you

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Show me what I can do right at the start. I know it's hard with this specific type of service, but some kind of screenshot or visualisation of the what you can do would be helpful. I don't know if it would work, but one idea I find quite intriguing would be some sort of reduced live demo right at the start page. I honestly didn't really understand what you were offering until I tried it out, so this seems to be the easiest way to show what you can do.

And what does registring get me? If nothing, then don't even allow it, if something, then show me what.

By the way, I really love that you fill the generate form with sane defaults. You don't even have to think about filling anything in and can just start to see what it's all about. Lesser sites would annoy you with stupid "Required field" warnings.

Great website! I actually will probably take advantage of this.

As far as design goes, the site looks pretty good. It's not super flashy, but I think that's generally a good thing.

A few minor nitpicks.

1) I think you should put a few images on the homepage, and possibly elsewhere. Text is nice, but I find I value the visual description as well. A picture's worth a thousand words and whatnot.

2) This is very minor, but when I was registering, I accidentally hit enter before I entered my password. Naturally, the page spit back a few messages saying I needed to fill out more fields. I have no problem with this, as it's just standard behavior. What bugged my was the error messages indicating the fields I had left blank. The title of the field and the field itself get separated by the error message, which itself seems too big. I'd consider a different way of indicating that a field needs correcting. Very minor though.

EDIT: The login screen does this too, and also, when I mistype my login, it just says "please correct the errors below" which is not a standard "your login is incorrect" message.

Also, I guess I have no idea if having an account actually provides me with any advantages. I didn't see any changes with the site, other than the fact that I could logout.

A bug: After logging in, when I click on one of the worksheet topics to fill out my preferences and then generate it, I am automatically logged out.

Great site overall!

This page is almost an exemplar for the story I was reading earlier about "coders can't market". Your site looks useful and like bingo-card generator could earn you a nice living - I'd check out his marketing and design (colourful and bright not drab brown, teachers need joy!).

Also you should check out your competition, decide what your unique selling points are and market your advantages.

Your strapline sucks, IMO, something more like "the super-easy, super-fast, instant online maths* worksheet generator; because practice makes perfect".

I'd also look at the Home-Ed market and spam some of their forums ... in a nice way.

* It's maths dammit, not math.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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..

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

The register and login links shouldn't be visible on every page. Instead ask users to login when they actually need to log in (e.g. creating sheets). Contact us shouldn't be a big tab, instead something in the footer.

Your "Follow Us" "On Twitter" part should be all one line, and perhaps be reworded to "You should follow us on twitter <a href="bork">here</a> (see http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html)

The 1px border at the bottom of the page shouldn't extend past the footer, this looks pretty ugly.

The front page "Worksheets available" could be reworked into a "Popular Worksheets" ranking sheets on the number of views.

The text fields in the registration page should all line up, it looks pretty bad how they are at the moment. Also on that page:

"We'll only use your email to send you signup instructions" could be reworded to "We'll only use your email for signup", less words means people are more likely to read it.

Really appreciate this. We are not a designer so this info is really helpful. Thank you.

You should also use a fixed page width IMO, something like http://www.blueprintcss.org/ will help keep a text alignment grid and sort out your colums too, see the CSS file generator at http://kematzy.com/blueprint-generator/ .

I disagree on the "popular worksheets" idea. I think most will want a specific form of worksheet rather than the most popular, an option to sort by popularity would be good. You might want to look at table sorting in JQuery (eg http://tablesorter.com/docs/#Demo ).

Twitter? Use the twitter bird! A picture is worth 1E3 lexical tokens.

Knowing whether I could generate anything more advanced than what was shown on the available worksheets stopped me from bothering to register. In other words, having to register in order to discover if "this is it or there's more" was an impediment to registering.

For example, my son is studying basic graphs and functions. y=3X + b. Would have been more likely to register if I had reason to believe I could generate worksheets for that type of work.

More generally, I saw no reason to register at all.

I liked the simplicity.

I also like the pdf generation, contrary to others. I liked seeing the results as-is immediately, and my browser (FF on linux) had no trouble opening the pdf for me in an external reader.

However, it would be nice to see an example graphic/screen shot somewhere: two thumbnails, leading to a worksheet graphic and its answer sheet.

The Home Page needs to be simplified. Try using less text and the ones that actually say what your site about like "A simple free site to generate maths worksheets". You can ask users to spread the word post worksheet generation. (Thats just a suggestion that might help making the home page less text heavy, but if its been working well for you, keep it)

Great idea and am sure lot of people out there will find it useful. All the best

Thank you for this feedback. We will implement it.

I downloaded a worksheet and got a file without extension(named:download); I renamed the file to .pdf and opens fine. Would be better if I get a file name of worksheet-type.pdf

I also want to add - it would be nice to see the target age of kids based on the selections or select worksheets based on age, narrowing down to particular type.

fyi- the layout on the pdf is clean (and very kid friendly)

What is the browser you are using? The download pdf file does have an extension for us.

We will include the age targeted and grade based worksheets.

Very quick feedback: it was immediately obvious to me what the site did, and it only took a couple of clicks to make it do something useful. This is exactly the way that things should be. The site solves a clear problem and it does it well. Good stuff.

I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?

We want to offer advanced worksheets for paying customer...we have options but nothing is concrete at this point.

Note makeworksheets ( http://makeworksheets.com/samples/math/index.html ) seem like stiff competition and there yearly charge is $30, quite cheap for a teacher given the utility.

This would have been great for my wife who was a math teacher that had a horrible time creating original worksheets.

first of all the idea is great, and when my son is older I will definitely use this. What would be really nice is some sort of guidance system by age. For instance, which worksheets are appropriate for which age, maybe as a wide range. and the parameters within the worksheets could use a recommendation as well. This is because as a first time parent it is hard to tell as i've already gotten the feeling that presenting toys of wrong difficulty sometimes really results in reduced intended effect.

We are plan to add age and grade based menu soon. Thank you.

Don't forget to mention which country/regions grading system you're using.

I'm curious what framework you use to generate the pdfs?

TeX?

yep, it's pdfTeX, I just verified it in the document properties. I'm glad you used it :)

We used Texlive 2008 to generate these worksheet. It's great.

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