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Ask HN: Review my weekend project, testist.com

4 points by noodle ↗ HN
Backstory: About a year ago I started searching for a service that made creating custom tests easy and had some useful features (API, email results, etc). After looking for a long time, I could only come up with one -- Zoho Challenge. After working with that for about a year, its been nothing but headaches, broken functionality and customer service problems. Fast forward to present. I need a project to help me learn Rails (better late than never?). So, I decided to build something I know I would use -- a better online test service. I'm trying to build out the functionality I want to see in a form that others could use.

What it is (or will be): A better version of Zoho Challenge, initially more oriented towards developers. Or, perhaps a good description would be Wufoo for tests/quizzes/exams. Basically, a service built to create, host, and integrate online tests easily into whatever you're doing so that you don't have to code something up yourself.

Link: http://testist.com

Its a weekend project in which I was learning along the way, so its a little bare-bones. Other than that, any thoughts? Would you use it if it were more fully featured? Etc..? Right now I'm aiming for the features I want (since I'm my first customer) and things are kind of simple, but I'm aiming for more complex features in the future to touch upon a more academic level of service.

12 comments

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ibdknox
Perhaps there's something I'm missing? All I see at that link is a default wordpress install.
noodle
perhaps a DNS propagation issue, i was pointing it to something temporary for a while up until an hour or two ago. http://testist.heroku.com should also work
rfntv
Do you have a walk-through on how to build a test from scratch? I'd totally use this on one of my membership sites. Bookmarked!
noodle
not yet, but its not too tough to figure out since there aren't many options yet.

i'll see about writing something up as soon as possible, though, as well as adding more information inline.

pkamb
Too much text. I have no idea what the site does.

You need a nice big verbal call to action button: -"Create an XXXXX" -"Make a YYYYY now" -etc.

The things people can do on your site are "Register" and "Sign In." Those aren't things people want to do, those are ends to a mean. Give us an enticing link to click, because right now the 3 in your header are extremely large barriers.

noodle
i agree, and thats something that i'll be getting in there soon. my "weekend project" dragged out into wednesday, and the visible site is only one step up from bare-bones text. i probably should've held it until next weekend and polished it a bit more. hindsight, 20/20, etc.
fezzl
You might want to change the name...
noodle
why? i see one or two possible issues but nothing like experts exchange. insight would be appreciated
logicalmike
If fezzi is as immature as myself, then it has nothing to do with being too generic.
noodle
only thing i can think of is its one char off of testis. but i don't know if it would be that big of a deal. in the same ballpark as "pens.com" being one letter off of penis.

unless there's something else? and i couldn't come up with a better, relevant, easy to remember name. any suggestions?

fezzl
Friend: "So what's your startup?" You: "Testes.com" Friend: "Dude, I don't even want to know what it does man."