Feedback from a frustrated new user

[anon191]

In the hopes of helping you improve this product, here's some feedback from me, a new user about to give up after perhaps 5 hours of reading documentation and 20 open tabs related to wowchemy/hugo/academic/whatever-you-want-to-call-this.

I found the guides to be incredibly frustrating. They keep sending me in loops (one page links to another, which links back to the first page).

Here's just one sample frustration: In order to figure out how to provide feedback, I went to wowchemy.com/docs/ and searched "feedback". I clicked on a result called "feedback and contributing", which lead here: https://wowchemy.com/docs/contribute/ ...but this page is only about contributing, not feedback. Fine, I clicked through to the github link, read the whole (irrelevant) page, and concluded there's no place to leave feedback except on the current discussion forum on which I'm posting. I then had to create an anonymous github account as I don't want this post tied to my name. This in turn required me to create an anonymous email address. All that just to leave some feedback about the product in what is likely the wrong place anyway.

Here's what happened when I tried to make a website using whatever this is (what's the difference between the terms "wowchemy", "hugo", "academic", and "netlify"? I think I'm starting to understand, but it is still pretty confusing).

Step 1: I go to https://wowchemy.com/, and click "get started - it's free".
Step 2: I click the "researcher starter" theme.
Step 3: Now I'm at https://wowchemy.com/plans/ for some reason, so I click "Free"
Step 4: Now I'm at https://wowchemy.com/docs/install/, so I click the "choose a template"
Step 5: Now I'm back where I was in Step 2, so I click the "researcher starter" theme, and everything repeats.

I did eventually figure out that the researcher starter is the only template that is paid, something you try hard to hide but which ends up creating this click loop above.

OK, now I've clicked the academic template, and I try to follow the instructions here: https://wowchemy.com/docs/install/
Things more or less go OK, except that the "Write content online" misleads me into believing that I can edit everything through the admin page on the website, and yet there are a lot of parts of the website I cannot change through there. Eventually I figure out that I need to change those separately, by editing files in github.

For a while everything seems good. Then I get to the main thing I wanted a website for: listing publications. I notice that https://wowchemy.com/docs/install/ does not talk about how to list publications at all. Since I cannot find instructions for this, I search "publications" in wowchemy, and get here: https://wowchemy.com/docs/managing-content/. Scrolling down to "create a publication", I see the instructions: "Open your Terminal or Command Prompt app and install Academic’s admin tool:" followed by some command line arguments.

Hold on, what now? To simply add publications, I need to download all the code on my own computer? What's the point of all those fancy widgets? I thought I could make a website without coding - I guess this was a lie, since publications is the main thing I want on the website.

I go to "edit on your PC" to see how to install things on my computer. I see the message:

"We highly recommend the one-minute Github/Gitlab install using your web browser before considering following the steps on this page to download and edit your site on your computer. [...] For beginners, we recommend using the cloud editing tools rather than setting up an editing environment on your computer."

I go to try to follow those steps again for editing things online. Once again I cannot figure out how to add publications. I guess beginners don't get to have publications? What is even the point of an academic website if there are no publications listed?

Now I'm torn: I could start installing developer tools on my mac in order to get python 3, then install homebrew, then hugo, then download the source code from github, then install the academic tools package, then try to get everything to work locally... just to add a publication. I would then need to figure out how to get this back on the internet, which I guess means figuring out git?

Or I could just give up and make a website in html. All I really wanted to do was to have my university page have some nicer formatting. I don't trust the wowchemy docs anymore to help me if I get stuck, so I'm leaning towards giving up.

Anyway, thanks for reading this rant. I hope one day this hugo/academic/wowchemy/netlify/whatever thing actually works for making websites in a simple way, and I'll try it again at that point. Thanks for all the effort you've put into it.

My main recommendation: consider investing in a better way to solicit feedback from actual beginners.

[rodrigoalcarazdelaosa]

As one of the moderators of the Discord community, I am deeply sorry for your frustration. Let me go through some of your comments:

I found the guides to be incredibly frustrating. They keep sending me in loops (one page links to another, which links back to the first page).

As part of a big and deep transition to use Hugo Modules, the documentation site of Wowchemy probably still needs to be updated, as it contains references to the previous version. @gcushen is working on it and hopefully will be able to update it sooner than later, or at least open the repo so the community can submit pull requests to update it.

Here's just one sample frustration: In order to figure out how to provide feedback, I went to wowchemy.com/docs/ and searched "feedback". I clicked on a result called "feedback and contributing", which lead here: https://wowchemy.com/docs/contribute/ ...but this page is only about contributing, not feedback. Fine, I clicked through to the github link, read the whole (irrelevant) page, and concluded there's no place to leave feedback except on the current discussion forum on which I'm posting. I then had to create an anonymous github account as I don't want this post tied to my name. This in turn required me to create an anonymous email address. All that just to leave some feedback about the product in what is likely the wrong place anyway.

This is definitely a good place to leave feedback and get help. Discord is probably the best and quickest way though (discussions that need more care are then moved here). You can see the buttons to the left of the Get Started button (top right) on the main Wowchemy site.

For a while everything seems good. Then I get to the main thing I wanted a website for: listing publications. I notice that https://wowchemy.com/docs/install/ does not talk about how to list publications at all. Since I cannot find instructions for this, I search "publications" in wowchemy, and get here: https://wowchemy.com/docs/managing-content/. Scrolling down to "create a publication", I see the instructions: "Open your Terminal or Command Prompt app and install Academic’s admin tool:" followed by some command line arguments.

You can also use the content found in the exampleSite and copy for example a given publication to start editing a new one (that's equivalent to the hugo new --kind publication command). This way you should be able to write content online.

Or I could just give up and make a website in html. All I really wanted to do was to have my university page have some nicer formatting. I don't trust the wowchemy docs anymore to help me if I get stuck, so I'm leaning towards giving up.

If you want to get the most out of Wowchemy, you're probably better editing your content locally using hugo and all those tools you mentioned (including git to push your changes to your online repo). But I'd recommend give it a try and join us in the Discord server, where @gcushen, @chrede88 and myself (and the rest of the community) will do our best to get you started, and help you whenever you get stuck.

Wowchemy is indeed an awesome website builder that can help you leverage your online presence, so please don't give up and give it another try, you won't regret it 😉.