Site News

Note From The Editor

on Aug 18th 2008 with 124 comments

Jeffrey here. I have a few things that I’d like to go over with everyone – as well as some questions. If you don’t mind, take a couple of minutes and leave a comment with your thoughts.

We’re Looking For A Staff Writer

We’re currently looking for one more person to write a weekly tutorial. Here is the catch; I’m looking for someone unique. We’ve got PHP, WordPress, and jQuery covered. I need someone to cover everything else – from Flash to Ruby. If you think you have the goods, Email Us and we’ll talk! The pay is $150 per tutorial.

What Do You Want?

I’d like to know what sort of tutorials you are craving? The community determines what we post, so please leave a comment with your opinion. Personally, I’d like to see more frameworks and libraries covered – like Ruby, ASP.NET, Drupal, MooTools, etc. I’d like to post some more Flash tutorials as well. What do you want?

Quick Tips: Stay Or Go?

My plan is to have a full tutorial every morning (Central Time) and a quick tip in the evening. Are you enjoying these quick tips, or would you prefer that we focus more on the full tutorials? Personally, I enjoy five minute tips. My days are busy and allow little time for deciphering long tutorials – although I try to make time whenever I can. P.S. On my personal site, I, just today, rolled out a series of “Two Minute Video Tips” to be posted every day during the work week. Be sure to check those out if you enjoy such things.

Premium Service Is On The Way

We are currently working to bring a “premium” members service to NETTUTS. For $19 per month, you’ll gain access to many features – TBD. Once again, my question to you is: What would you expect for your $19 per month? Personally, I’d like to see exclusive video tutorials. Other ideas might be t-shirts and/or a magazine subscription? This is all speculation right now, but your feedback will help us a great deal!

One Last Request

Over the next week or so, I’m going to be compiling a massive list of the best web development books available – as voted by you! Please take a few seconds to vote. After I’ve received all of the submissions, I’ll create a posting that details the top ten or twenty!


Thanks, everyone!

 
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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. Also, I'm finishing up my latest book on Laravel Testing! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.  

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  • http://redseasound.com/blog roger  

    would love to join psdtuts and nettuts but you will increase your customer base when you do something about having to have a credit card attached to your paypal account!

    sorry tried the nice softly way before and no-one did anything!

  • http://craigsnedeker.blogspot.com/ Craigsnedeker

    Well, I wouldnt mind seeing more CSS tutorials, since I can’t code php, ruby, etc. I dunno, the CSS topic has been pretty much covered.

    About a premium, I probably wouldn’t pay for premium any way cause I don’t have a job or anything like that, but I think tutorials that are exceptional or really detailed video tutorials would be good, but I wouldn’t do make downloads premium only.

  • http://mcarthurgfx.com/ Sean McArthur

    Quick tips should stick around. Like you mentioned, I sometimes have to skip the tutorials ’cause I don’t have time to read the whole thing. But quick tips are short enough to squeeze in.

  • http://www.linuxhaxor.net pavs

    Jeffrey, I would definitely like to see more CSS and wordpress tuts. it’s never enough.

    As for premium membership. This model works nice for PSDtuts IMO, but to use this model for tutorials in nettuts, I would except something exceptional, that hasn’t been covered before anywhere else (very tough!).
    Magazine would be a nice option for nettuts Premium service.

  • http://www.detacheddesigns.com Jeffrey Way
    Author

    @pavs – In regards to the premium members, I agree with you. That’s why I’m working hard to make sure that what we offer is stellar. Otherwise, it won’t be worth your $9.

  • http://joemako.com Joe Mako

    How about a tutorial for ExpressionEngine?

  • ntulip

    I don’t know about a subscription program. Many have tried and failed, further it gave the community a sence of “The hell with them” and it frustrated me personally.

    I have to say that $9 would have to bring me $9 worth of value each month and I am already getting that from your articles now. Question is how would you top that off? I guess I am answering a question with a question and its not what you’re expecting.

  • http://www.vintom.com Vin Thomas

    I love your jQuery tutorials. But I would love to see something like “Learning jQuery in 15 lessons” or something like that. I think there are a lot of CSS/XHTML guru’s out there who would love to incorporate jQuery, but just don’t know where to start.

  • http://hayespotter.co.nr Hayes Potter

    I would write a weekly tutorial, but I do not know any flash or ruby on rails just php, wordpress (extensively), and CSS (extensively), and jquery.

  • http://talkingtofu2.iblogger.org/ Taylor Satula

    Please don’t do what psdtuts did when they had premium thats why i don’t go to psdtuts anymore everything that was free got worse and worse. Then downloads started to dissapear PLEASE Don’t do that.But like what above have been saying more wp and css tuts

    :)

    I Hope You Get It Right!

    :)

  • http://cyberantix.org Connor

    I definitely like the Quick Tips and think they should stay. Sometimes you just don’t have enough time to follow a full length tutorial.

    As far as premium service, like you said, it will be harder to offer a product. I personally am intrigued by the t-shirt idea.

  • Josh

    I feel the premium service should be for all of the TUTS sites. So 9 dollars for all the sites premium services. I cant see myself paying for PSDtuts and NETtuts. 10 for both makes sense.

    just my 2 cents.

  • http://www.detacheddesigns.com Jeffrey Way
  • http://randyhammons.com RHammons

    What I Want?
    I think we could use some Flash/AS3 tutorials and best-practices, more CSS, more(read not just jquery) JavaScript Framework tutorials and walk-throughs, Video Tutorials (maybe? maybe not…), etc.

    Quick Tips?
    I love ‘em. I think it never hurts to have short bursts of very useful info, and yes, I think as professionals, or those working their way to being professionals, we understand some things will be obvious or feel redundant at times, but it doesn’t mean its not new and useful to someone else.

    Premium?
    I’m not a huge fan of a division to premium services, imho, but I understand the ads don’t always pay the bills. I avoid PSDTuts Premium service, but I might consider a NetTuts premium service if it had the right stuff. What that right stuff is, is beyond me at the moment. Script Libraries? Downloadable Video Tutorials? Classes/Series on higher end projects (ie., developing an e-commerce site, creating a content management system from scratch, etc.) I think you put yourself in a tough spot doing this though as it’ll be harder to satisfy everyone since everyone wants to work on different platforms, and at different paces, but still want their money’s worth.

  • http://enhance.qd-creative.co.uk James

    The key with offering premium services is not to diminish the benefit which non-members receive from this site. Like nTulip said, we’re already receiving very valuable tutorials, the $9 should be for something to round it off…

    Maybe you could offer some discounts for premium service members. You could make a deal with lynda.com or o’rielly books … or sitepoint books! … For instance, you could offer premium members 10% off books / tutorials from those sites!

    A forum???: I don’t know if it’s been considered yet but I think this site really needs a forum to host in-depth discussions, questioning sessions about tutorials and general discussions and queries about CSS/HTML/JS/PHP etc. etc… I really think a forum would benefit everyone! :)

    I think the quick tips are good but it’s important to differentiate NETTUTS somehow – lots of blogs offer the odd quick tip – the ones offered here have to be interesting, innovative and if possible, ground-breaking! :D

    As far as tutorials go I’d like to see a couple of general usability/accessibility as well as semantics and web standards. I’d really appreciate a well-written article from a professional on one of these topics! :)

  • http://craigsnedeker.blogspot.com/ Craigsnedeker

    Maybe tutorials for coding stuff for other websites (i.e. blogger templates, wp templates, freewebs easybuilder templates, etc).

  • http://www.detacheddesigns.com Jeffrey Way
    Author

    @James – Yeah, I completely agree with the Forum comment. NETTUTS 100% needs it. I’ll take with the management about that. It wouldn’t be too difficult to set up.

  • http://www.javierios.com Javier Rios

    I would like to see more tutorials on java script but that is because I am getting more into as of late. I also would like to see more on WordPress and other CMS but also a starter section on back end tutorials. For the premium package, a yes on video tutorials. I am not sure about subscription to a magazine, I like how all your stuff is online, I can access it anywhere i am at. I will do more thinking on this as this was just off top of my head. I also would like to see some things on silver light. I do not use it but am curious.

  • http://www.tonygines.com Tony

    I second the request for Expression Engine tutorials.

  • http://www.brothersgrimmstudios.com Daniel Erickson

    I’d love to see more tutorials on Ruby and back end development. I’m trying to cross over from just a designer into a developer/designer.

    As far as a membership goes, I’d offer some sort of one on one support service. So people can get help with their projects, and get feedback for ideas.

  • http://mokshasolutions.com Moksha

    Its really nice that all your site give so much to us, we are very thankful.
    but you never cover anything about ASP.NET / Atlas / SilverLight.

    I think all your sites are above all the sites which provide tutorial and there is a big different in quality your sites provide, i know there are same number of programmer as of PHP. even if you give 1% of your time to ASP.net

    People who work in dotnet will learn lot from your work. please consider it, sometime in future.

    thanks

  • http://mcarthurgfx.com/ Sean McArthur

    Thinking on it, one thing you could offer for Premium is downloadable effects. A CSS Framework (the devil, I know), a Javascript effect (FancyBox charges 30-odd dollars for commercial use), an in-depth plug-in for WordPress, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc.

    It’s nice to release smaller effects and demo’s, but us developers sometimes create larger effects, that would take a while to explain, so you can release the Source for someone to read through, and use in commercial projects?

    *shrug*

  • David

    I’d like to see some more PHP myself. I’m having hard time finding some good up to date tutorials for it, and I think it have been limited on NETTUS too.
    F.x I’m currently looking for a way to make a Php gallery with some upload/edit/delete functions, which I would gladly pay the 9$ to learn, if that was the case.

    Other than that, +1 on the quick tips and forum, as well. Looking forward to the changes :-)

  • http://instantsolve.net Thomas Milburn

    Nettuts has covered some great topics and the quality of each tutorial is the sticking point for me. Some quick tips don’t cut it for me because they cover the kind of stuff that a quick Google will answer. I want tutorials which give me more advanced tips explained in a clear and concise way.

    Personally I think that Nettuts should focus on just a few areas of web development. Covering PHP, ruby, python, perl and ASP is way to much for anyone to take in. Better to have quality articles on a narrow range of topics. Just concentrating on CSS, HTML, PHP, MYSQL, WordPress and JQuery would be great for me.

    I would like some tutorials on how to develop websites at a more advanced level and how to combine code successfully. Sites like http://www.w3schools.com may cover every single HTML element, CSS selector and PHP function but aren’t of much use on their own. The best web tutorial I have found so far is http://www.phpwebcommerce.com/

    It covers how to create a web commerce site and covers every step of creating an e-commerce site from scratch. While the outcome is pretty useless the tutorial clearly shows how to lay out a database, file structure, sessions and user interface. This is the level of tutorial I expect form Nettuts.

  • http://talkingtofu2.iblogger.com Taylor Satula

    Now that i have had some time to think it over i would LOVE a shirt. Also its good advertising for nettuts. Make it nettuts colors

    Way cool

  • http://devjargon.com Alex

    I like the idea of CodeIgniter/CakePHP tutorials. These tools can make developing some smaller web apps a little easier for the average developer.

    On the note of Flash/Actionscript tutorials, it’s difficult to do that and keep the quality up. 90% of Flash developers are self taught by sites like FlashKit and Pixel2Life, which offer sub-par tutorials at best. All of these tutorials are full of deprecated, or just plain wrong code/logic.

    Someone would have to make sure that the accepted Flash tutorials were solid tutorials that don’t teach any sort of bad practices or warped logic.

    That said, tutorials on programming basics would be useful to all those designers who are stuck with css/html because they don’t get the logic behind development. Teach the logic and the syntax comes naturally after that, right?

    Another Flash related avenue to explore would be the math behind animations. Most people think they can grab the tween tool and do all the cool things they see on websites. That’s rarely the case though. Almost all of it is math, and not the easy stuff either.

    My 2 cents…

  • http://www.danharper.me Dan Harper

    For a premium service, perhaps have a few series of tutorials – new parts twice a week – all coming to a final, much bigger project? There have been a few ideas I’ve had for a tutorial, but simply felt in order to cover it in as much detail as I’d have liked, it would need to be in multiple parts. Just a thought.

    I would love to be a staff/frequent writer, and actually enjoy writing tutorials for the community. However, my strong points lie in XHTML, CSS, WordPress & other CMS’s with a bit of jQuery and PHP/SQL combo. I don’t know anything enough to write tutorials for other languages.
    Although I would love to see some Ruby and ASP.NET tutorials to try and extend the area of topics covered by the site.

    And about Flash – doesn’t Collis have plans for a flash tutorials site? (FLATUTS?) Would that work well with another site covering it?

    From what James said, I also feel a forum would be a MUST for the site.

    One more thing: a few more PSD-to-HTML tutorials for beginners I’m sure would be great additions to attract more people just getting started in design.

  • http://enhance.qd-creative.co.uk James

    @Sean McArther – I love your idea. We should get a team together and develop a killer jQuery app and brand it as NETTUTS-APPS or something like that… Great idea!

  • http://craigsnedeker.blogspot.com/ Craigsnedeker

    I have an idea for another tut site: GIMPTUTS for Gimp, and VIDTUTS for video editing / production tutorials.

  • http://devjargon.com Alex

    @Dan Harper: Yeah, I think Collis is planning FLATUTS…I think he announced purchasing the domain a while ago.

    More tutorials for entry level people would be good. It should help expand the user base of nettuts too. Basic HTML tutorials should be covered as well. There’s a lot of stuff that even jr. level web developers would take for granted that a designer would find a huge barrier.

    Also, I’m all for the quick tips and I like the idea of a forum too.

  • http://benschaaf.com benjo

    TUTS that I would fancy seeing:
    1. ExpressionEngine
    2. MooTools
    3. Scriptilicious
    –

    RE: Premium account incentives;

    Like other’s have posted, I am not a huge fan of the paysite format. But, if it is required, I would expect to see the items I listed below. However, just because I would expect to see those items does not mean I would sign up. :/

    1. Downloadable goods (templates/fonts/etc)
    2. Downloadable tuts
    –

  • http://www.ursino.info Mark

    I know ASP.NET from work. It seems like people rarely like .NET unless that’s all they do. I, on the other hand, am technology agnostic. So, if you’re looking for some .NET stuff, I can possibly contribute from time-to-time (or at least try to).

  • http://craigsnedeker.blogspot.com/ Craigsnedeker

    More Mootools and Jquery, like total beginner tuts. thanks.

  • grazz

    As someone has already pointed out the NETTUTS tutorials may be too advanced, at least they are for me. Some tutorials covering the fundamentals of each programming language would be much appreciated.

    However my humble opinion is you’re trying to cover too much stuff in just one place. You could split NETTUTS up in three parts: HTML/CSS/jQuery tutorials (for web designers), PHP/ASP/Ruby/ecc. tutorials (for programmers), FLASH tutorials (well I think Flash deserves its own site, don’t you?). Or maybe you could split it in NETTUTS/beginners and NETTUTS/advanced. Just my idea.

    Quick tips are fine by me as they can serve as reminders.

    And one last thing that has totally nothing to do with this, but I would LOVE to see a tutorial site for video editing (I’m so into After Effects right now!!).

  • http://z3media.com Brauny

    I like the Quick Tips…please keep them around.

  • http://www.danharper.me Dan Harper

    Just to add to my last post: I love the quick tips. :)

  • http://www.dailyresumetips.com Chris

    Just my 10 cents. I would like to see more CSS and WordPress coverage. What ever happened to the Rockstar WordPresser book? It seems like it has been 5 or 6 months ago this was mentioned and then nothing. What’s going on with this?

    Best regards,
    ChrisS

  • http://www.ara-abcarians.com Ara Abcarians

    I love the quicktips.. they should stay.

    I would love to see more wordpress tutorials covering topics like custom fields and integration of jquery or mootools to create useful widgets for wordpress

    Flash tutorials incorporating XML to create navigation menus and photo galleries both for beginners and advanced users

    keep up the great work!

  • http://www.detacheddesigns.com Jeffrey Way
    Author

    @Chris – They’re hard at work on the book with Harley. Expect to receive some news on the book in the next month or so.

  • http://www.danharper.me Dan Harper

    @Chris From Collis’ Twitter a few days ago: “recently found a coauthor to help finish the book named Harley Alexander, so not long to go now!”

  • http://thedailyapp.com Tommy M

    Like you said in your post, you cover WordPress and JQuery a lot. Why not Joomla! or other CMS’s?

    I sent in a Freelancing article I wrote in my spare time. I think I will go ahead and apply to this!

  • http://www.ben-griffiths.com Ben Griffiths

    Keep the quick tips :)

    One thing about the plus subscription – would there be a discount for a “pay for a year at once” option? Also, $9 every month seems quite a lot when the content on here is already pretty great – and especially so when you work out to paying over $100 per year – would you really be able to make it that worth while? That’s a similar price to buying a new web dev book every month, which would have masses more content…

  • http://www.ben-griffiths.com Ben Griffiths

    Sorry, the above was meant to read “every other month” ;)

    While your looking at future plans, would you consider an edit button? :D

  • http://www.koenbuysse.be koen buysse

    The current tutorials are fine (i a fact, they are what mkes this site great in the first place)
    I love the quick tips, and wouldn’t mind seeing more wordpress tuts (because it’s so popular and so fast-evolving, and has endless possibilities).

    For the Plus membership i shouldn’t make special T-shirts or whatever, people want tuts !
    so for the plus membership, bring plus tuts !, more advanced, and on more advanced languages than html (for example ruby) besides, only people seriously busy with web development and people truly looking to find out the latest techniques (web designers, free-lancers,…pro’s) are the ones that would pay 9/month for your knowledge, not the kid that thinks wants to make a neat-o website for his world-of-warcraft team…
    well that’s what i think…
    ps: sorry for my bad english, i’m dutch.

  • http://www.orbs-eu.co.uk Sebbie

    like to see more frameworks and libraries covered – like Ruby(what is that), Drupal, MooTools also I think the quick tip should keep going.

  • http://www.dailyresumetips.com Chris

    @DH Thanks I look forward to it.

  • Tim

    I’m not sure if this would be suitable for this site or not but I was thinking a tutorial for making a google or windows sidebar gadget would be good.

    I like the quick tips, I think they should stay. As long as they don’t stop the in depth tutorials from coming, I can’t see any harm in them.

  • http://www.paratextwebdesign.com Dayton Nolan

    Personally I would like to see less WordPress and CSS (the web is absolutely overloaded with these tutorials which can be learned in a weekend and mastered in a month) as I see that as hacking more than actual development. What about frameworks? Frameworks are the future. No one is coding absolutely from scratch anymore. I could provide Code Igniter tutorials, but would also like to see what other frameworks can do as well. I was very excited about Nettuts when it launched but haven’t seen anything very compelling as most of the tutorials are geared towards absolute beginners. How ’bout some more advanced things like OOP, Web services like AWS and API’s. Good performance and security tutorials are rare in contrast to all the simple stuff. I would only pay for tutorials that help me make more money as a developer. I pay $250/yr for a VTC membership and it’s absolutely priceless, I can learn virtually anything I want. At $9 a month ($108/yr) you’d have to provide serious value that can’t be Googled or found in documentation. I may be outside the target market as I consider myself an advanced developer but when you say web development, I don’t think WordPress, CSS and XHTML, I think Ruby, PHP, MySQL, AJAX, .Net(yuck), Django, etc. The J-query stuff has been great but I’ve already invested time and money into Prototype and Scriptaculous and would love to see more on those libraries. My advice is to think about what you had to learn by old fashioned research because the tutorials just weren’t available. Quicktips are great, maybe you could pick obscure PHP functions that are lessor known but very useful and provide some quick examples of practical uses. Classes would be a valuable commodity for pro accounts but they’d have to be iron clad with great APIs and portability. Serious developers are always looking to improve their bag of tricks but the last thing the web needs is another CSS/XHTML tutorial site. No offense to the beginners, but that stuff is simple and the web is saturated with it. I don’t mean to be overcritical but you asked our opinions and I’m very opinionated. It’s simple:

    if($content == “quality”)
    {
    $readership = “growing”;
    }
    else
    {
    $readership = “waning”;
    }

  • lightupbox

    Yeah, the Quick Tips have been cool so far. I find that sort of factoid a nice way to build my toolbox.

    And personally, I’d love to see some intro to Javascript topics.

  • Panchez

    I would love to see some Expression Engine tutorials!!!

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