dohowto.com : video tutorials

all ybp’s know that part of staying one step ahead of the competition is not only adapting to your environment, but learning new skills. for some us, especially those that may not be as technically sound as bill gates or steve jobs, learning technical skills can be difficult.

with the explosion of online video with youtube.com and google video (also read: peekvid.com), users are also able to benefit from video tutorials. many authors of the video use ‘screencasting‘ to capture the button clicks and mouse movements so that they a user can ‘look over their shoulder’ about how to do that new flash effect or photoshop trick.

thus, where dohowto.com comes in. we received an email from its creator, chapman montgomery, to check it out.

i browsed a few tutorials in the photoshop, illustrator, and swift3d directories and liked what i saw. the interface is very clean and simple. it looks like the site is still in an ‘alpha’ stage since the sitemap didn’t come up for me and there were a few typos in the privacy policy and terms of use. other than that, selecting each category of tutorials brought up another list with a more concise listing.

once you narrowed down your exact specifications, you were given a list of links to the actual video which dohowto.com keeps inside of itself so that you’re not exploring outside of the site. while the beginning selection criteria implemented ajax well, once you click on a link, it did bring open a new window. my only suggestion would be if the site could allow you to see the search criteria and videos all in the same screen so you don’t have to go back and forth.

all in all, dohowto.com is pretty cool site and definitely will benefit any ybp out there looking to up their technical and application skill set.