I think the requirement of account creation is a hinderance to helping spread the word of the site...I don't really have any intention of following these lessons (because I've used Foundation before and know CSS pretty well) but I would recommend them if, after skimming them, the site's implementation is well done.
I understand the desire to gauge user interest and get their contact info, but why not let the signup process be more organic (i.e. you sign up after the first few lessons because you recognize the value of the service), as it is for Codecademy?
(there is a "view lessons" in the top right, but it's not intuitive, given the signup modal)
This is something that I've always felt Foundation needed.
I'm a side-project hacker, and as much as I love Twitter Bootstrap I always wanted something different. I used Foundation for a few projects but found myself gravitating back to Bootstrap because of the abundance of tutorials that have built up my familiarity.
The structure of these lessons is great - probably more useful than Bootstrap 'getting started' pages.
The use of JSFiddle style learning is awesome.
The only thing I don't like is that it requires email/password - however given it's not built by Zurb I can see why the makers have gone down that path. Perhaps a better method would have been to only ask for those details once a user wants to go beyond the first few lessons?
Thanks for the honest feedback, we tried to place a lot of emphasis on interactivity and problem-solving based learning.
Asking to create an account later makes sense, the lessons are open to try without creating an account here http://www.tryfoundation.io/learn/. We wanted users to create accounts in order for them to save progress and code especially for further bigger projects, thoughts?
I did not see that link initially, I think it would be worth a/b testing a version where the option to play without signing up button is visually as dominant as the signup.
Visitors that know that they don't know enough will always signup. I knew that I'd like to learn more Foundation, so immediately submitted my email address. But I would suggest that a decent slice of your users don't know what they don't know - ie. that there is a Bootstrap alternative that is just as flexible, powerful, and easy to learn. Getting those people three steps down the path before giving them a hurdle of signup would, in my opinion, result in a larger user count and greater project impact in the long run.
I'd definitely add the examples pane from the actual lessons to the home page tutorial. My impression after trying <button>Button</button> was that I need to go read the Foundation docs instead. They're pretty impressive, I doubt I'd have come back if I'd left to do that.
I'm using it too and find it really nice to work with. The one reservation I have is the lack of keyboard navigation on custom form elements (e.g., checkboxes, combo boxes).
Well what I meant is HTML with minimal presentational classes like span6 push1 or something. I'd like the CSS classes in my HTML to be related to the object, not whatever grid framework I happen to be using.
I'm using SASS and the Foundation grid mixins to define visual components of the site (eg tag, display-picture, etc) that can be put on any page and have different sub classes (eg tag-small, display-picture-large).
With this, the goal is not to have CSS increase linearly with the number of pages/content because I've defined all the visual components of the site and they can be shared across pages.
I understand the desire to gauge user interest and get their contact info, but why not let the signup process be more organic (i.e. you sign up after the first few lessons because you recognize the value of the service), as it is for Codecademy?
(there is a "view lessons" in the top right, but it's not intuitive, given the signup modal)