Envato’s Kuala Lumpur Conference

Envato’s Kuala Lumpur Conference

on Apr 29th 2012 with 4 comments

We are currently half way through our two week Envato conference. This has been a great time to meet and mingle with all the people who make the network of Envato sites a reality. We’ve been having daily sessions discussing how to better help our different communities better “Earn and Learn” online.

I spend the vast majority of my time running Audiotuts+ (and Envato Notes), but there are a bunch of other incredible sites in the Envato Network. As you already know, Audiotuts+ is part of the collection of Tuts+ sites with free educational content being delivered to a massive audience each day.

This two week conference is a chance for the Tuts+ Editors along with all those who run the Marketplace sites to get together with the development team and admin staff to discuss the future of the company and have a super stellar time collaborating on best practices and company goals. We’ve also been “enjoying” the Malaysia heat! :-)

Swimming
Check out some of the most recent photos from the event.

Envato truly is an amazing company. We make the community a priority and it’s been awesome to hear many of the plans for growth. Good things are coming!

working

We’ve been chatting quite a bit about areas we can improve. I’d like to ask for your feedback too.

What have you enjoyed on the site? Is there anything you don’t like? Is there anything we’re missing?

Instead of just focusing too much on a specific tutorial or two, we’re more interested in bigger picture thoughts. For example, do you prefer written tutorials? Any other categories of content you’d like to see more of? If you could change anything about the interface or user experience that would make the site better, what would it be?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Adrian is writer and editor for Audiotuts+ and Envato Notes. He has been playing keys and acoustic guitar for three decades, and has six kids. Follow him on Twitter at @envatoaudio.  

Plus Premium
 
 
  • Science!

    More Videos! especially of the “make that sound” variety. You do a pretty good job of showing us how to creatively use plug-ins and effects, but a little more in-depth sound synthesis instruction would really round out the site in my opinion. More detail in the mixing tutorials might be nice too, but overall you run a good site… keep up the good work!

  • Thomas Bailey

    Just to make life interesting, I’m gonna disagree with Science! (Though that’s a pretty hard to name to butt heads with ;) ). I strongly prefer written tutorials; they have the advantage of being skimmable in a way that video is not. Plus it’s easy to identify what each section of a written tutorial is about, thanks to the nice big headers y’all always use. In contrast, if a video is talking about setup or something that I’m already familiar with, it’s hard to know exactly how far ahead to skip. Plus, I read way faster than most people talk, so I’m able to absorb information far more quickly from written material.

    On another topic, as much as I love you guys, I find that the tutorial categorization scheme is pretty bad on this website. I’ve intentionally tried to hunt through all of your archives to find things that interest me, but there are still times when you republish a tutorial that I’ve never seen before. I figure if I’ve looked at every tutorial I could find on your site and read all those that seemed interesting to me, I shouldn’t run into interesting republished tutorials that I haven’t read.

    Of course, my memory isn’t perfect, so part of it may be my fault, but nevertheless, I think there’s some potential improvement in categorization. For instance, what’s the difference between the “production” tutorials and “mixing” tutorials? Under production I see how to use saturation, and under mixing & mastering I see how to use compression. Both techniques reduce the dynamic range of the incoming signal, and both affect the color of the sound, so why are they in different places?

    Instead, I think that your “Sessions” are a much more natural way to organize the site, and I’d like to see that become more central. And instead of categories like “mixing and mastering,” you could index these sessions around more technical concepts (similar to how plug-ins are organized in DAW’s), e.g. put sessions about compressors, limiters, and gates under a “dynamics” category, or chorus, flanger, and phaser sessions in a “modulation” category. This would also make the site more user-friendly. If someone has a question about compression, they just look in their DAW, see that compression is listed under dynamics, then come to AudioTuts and start digging through the sessions in the “dynamics” category.

    All that said, you guys ARE doing a great job, so keep up the good work. I just figure by giving you some critical feedback, I can improve the experience for myself and other users.

    • http://adriantry.com Adrian Try
      Author

      Hi Thomas. Thanks for your detailed comment. We agree with a lot of your points, particularly on the way the site is organised. We’re planning to improve that and many other things in the next site update. I’m not sure when that will be – possibly later this year.

  • http://www.sleepparalysis.me George Mitropapas

    I also agree with the categorization, in addition of the existing way, there could also be other categorization methods(eg. by plugin, DAW, etc). Kind of like a cloud of keywords.

    Also, it would be good for authors to be able to get notified when someone posts a comment to one of his/her tutorials or when someone replies to a comment. So many users could be asking questions and it’s not easy for the author to be checking all tutorials just to see if there were any comments posted.

    Finally I’ve never been able to come to grips with the Search function. It seems that whenever I am looking for something particular I get extra and irrelevant results too.

    Apart from all that I think the website is great! Keep it up!