Feedback on lessons (front-end web)

Hi there,

I thought I'd leave some general feedback on Treehouse in case it's of any use.

Overall, i'm finding it a great learning resource. Prior to joining Treehouse, I have self-taught-built a few websites over the years, and so I wanted to started from the beginning to fill in any gaps and add some explanation to the the things that have become common to me.

To focus on the negative part, which is what I imagine would be of most use to you, I have found the 'paths' quite odd in terms of the differing level of engagement and flow.

I started with the 'How to build a website' lesson which was very engaging and held my attention, mainly because you can see your progress in developing a practical responsive website. However, once you've completed this part of the path, you move onto an HTML deep dive, which does seem like taking a big step back in terms of the efficiency of learning. That's fair enough, but you feel as though you're wasting time covering things you've already covered before in a way that assumes you have never covered it.

You then go onto the CSS deep dive. Now, this is clearly an important path and packed with the basic/essential selectors etc. However, this has now killed my progression; this is where it has gone from being enjoyable to being a chore that I am forcing myself to continue with. The main reason being is that it's just a relentless hit after hit of information (mainly things we already know, but that I do want to go over again to clear things up) without any practical implementation. You start from scratch with new code on each chapter, which is tedious (even though you can load the 'start' code), rather than building towards something that feels practical and rewarding.

Just off the top of my head, a couple of suggestions to keep things more interesting:

• It's fine to have chapters introducing new things with code specific to that task, but perhaps you can merge the 'challenges/tests' with an ongoing project that you build upon throughout the path. i.e. you are slowly piecing together a website and you can see how you're applying various things you've learnt to different areas of the website. So, the track becomes about building the website; it is about applying new things learned to a website, in a practical manner.

• I have always found a great way to learn is to take something that already exists and then adapt it to my specific needs. Another suggestion would be to provide relevant complete sites / templates along with parts of the paths which you can then play around and try to accomplish your own side projects. Seeing that what you're learning is practical is the foremost motivating factor when embarking on such a course.

• More coding challenges/tasks, embodying the community. Once you've been through a path, I think it would be good (with some boundaries/guidance) to get the student to pull something together on their own based on what they've learned. I appreciate that it's not realistic for the teachers/Treehouse to review and help on this, but student's can easily use the community / forums for people to review their work and perhaps help them with coding.

Just my thoughts. I will see if i can motivate myself through the path!

Many thanks for the service.

James