Ask HN: Review my site, CureCRM.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my site, CureCRM.com

curecrm.com

36 pointsalexS44 comments

Please candidly review CureCRM.com.

I'll cover initial impression first, and then go from there into specific things I notice.

First impression: way too much pimping, way too little describing. The front page seems more focussed on who uses it and how awesome they think it is than on what it is. I have a vague idea from your bulleted list, but no idea what differentiates this from all the other CRM systems. The companies you list might, but that is of no use to me. I'm not about to waste my time and contact them to tell me what you should have told me. The video might tell me, but I'm not compelled to watch the video. That combined with the odd and elongated layout would have the average customer uninterested in learning any more about the product.

Specific things: * Please, please remove the scrolling images part of the way down. They are distracting and get annoying after more than a few seconds. * Your page goes on below the fold on a 1024x768 monitor, and you have marketing content below that fold. This is very bad. I would honestly take the box of specific features and shove that near the top. In fact, that and a 2-3 sentence description of what the product does is all I could imagine being necessary on the front page. The client list and press hits could either sit at the bottom, or go on another page. * The page flow is very odd. I'm having a hard time figuring out where my eyes ought to be going. There is that weird block of white space right below the press icons, and on either side of that irritated scrolling thing, which make it hard for me to keep track of where I am on the page. I get the sense that you could solve the page flow problem the need for scrolling at the same time, just by taking advantage of the space you haven't used yet.

I should add the disclaimer that I am not a professional designer, and so some of the things that bother me might be considered good practice by people in the know.

Hope this helps.

how about something like this? http://screencast.com/t/OGU2NWE0YT

Better. I still have some more comments though.

Since this article is pretty much dead, you can hit me up by email if you're interested. :-)

To be honest I would leave very quickly because I can't see what you want me to buy. (In other words you need to tell people what you are selling them, even if it is just a bulleted list).

yeah, the status quo is a bit overly optimized for SEO - that will change soon. good feedback.

10 seconds into the site, if I don't know what it's about, I leave.

This is a clear case of poor design of the website hurting the sales of an otherwise perfectly decent application.

I am a designer and I can point out a 100 things wrong with this design.

PS. If you ever consider a redesign, contact me at mediarosh(at)gmail(dot)com

Regarding the home page:

Good: (i) Sign up for a free trial button obvious; (ii) Your logo at the top looks good; (iii) the one-minute tour is a good idea (but I couldn't get it working in Safari, so I couldn't watch it).

Needs improvement: (i) there is too much going on, (ii) it looks cluttered, so I'm not sure where to focus my attention; (ii) you might have your 4-picture header scroll automatically (I like 2 and 3, 1 looks way too busy, and 4 looks way too sparse); (iii) under "Customer Testimonials" (plural) you have only one testimonial - rather than announcing that there are testimonials, reduce cognitive load by having a bit quotation mark or something instead; (iv) I like the "the world best sell with CRM", but perhaps have it closer to the bottom; (v) perhaps have one "download now" button instead of several links (for the sake of appearing cleaner); (vi) I really don't like the "supports mobile e-mail" banner at the bottom: I know it's the sun, but it looks like a nuclear explosion, and apart from my own personal feelings about it, the colour scheme looks misplaced compared to the rest of the page.

If I had to sum up: make it simpler. A few (2 or 3) bullet points, a download button, a big "sign up" button. A testimonial.

here's a direct link to the video: http://screenr.com/Kg2 - please feel free to provide feedback on it.

regarding vi: this is a very common complaint from all of the designers i've chatted with.

"Start for free" neon green on light yellow/orange is bad, even with the text shadow. I'd dark it up for more contrast.

The 1->2->3->4 thingy should move a little bit faster.

The sidebar under the Learn More section bolds the text when you hover over it. This pushes the subsequent items down a pixel or two, causing the whole thing to wiggle when you hover over it. Not an easy fix, but it's the kind of thing that bugs me :)

The video pop up should play immediately when I click on it. I should have to pop it up and then hit play again. I bet you'll get more views on that video that way. Actually, it shouldn't even pop up at all. It should just be set to play right in place. That way I don't have to feel like I'm navigating away from the content to this other place to watch a video. That way if the video bores me at any point, I can still see the rest of the site and be sold to.

On a larger scale, the landing page needs some work. I would have something that points out that you can access the system via your existing email clients or via your web interface. That seems to be the power in it, so make it super-clear.

what do you think about swapping "2" with "1" in the top carousel?

It's close, but it's not quite the quick summary you need. Try to get the phrasing down as small as possible and avoid platitudes. "Track sales leads using your existing email!" or something to that effect.

EDIT: Just saw the video! I think you should delete 90% of the text you have. Make the video demo the focus. And go from there. Way you have it right now, I almost didn't see the video even after spending a minute or two on the site!

1. Great play on salesforce no-software mantra! As someone who has had a few people intern for sales in past months, I was immediately taken in by "no sales rep headache" pitch. Resonates well, at least with me! Now, can you meet my expectations?

2. From there on, unfortunately, your pitch goes downhill. Too much text. I'd start from scratch. Use your no-sales-rep pitch to grab attention. Then have 4-5 bullet points, each explaining a problem your app fixes. And later in the page, the finer details for the people still unsure/have questions about your app.

Check the site in about 5 seconds - we're "live" implementing a lot of the comments... outsourcing our web design to you guys...

An email I received this morning:

"Hope all is well. Would you guys mind upvoting this? This is my new company:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013389

Best, - Emil Gilliam"

Surely begging emails like this are an improper use if the voting system.

It's pretty much an inevitable use of the voting system.

Yes, there's nothing you can do to prevent people from doing this, but I notice that on other voting based news sites such gaming has reduced the quality.

I think asking for upvoting is not fair but I seriously don't know if you sharing this is really okay.

I think it's ok to call astroturfers out, because too much of that sort of thing goes on.

Too noisy. The circle-with-slash is tacky, as are all the logos.

JMHO, however, as I am not in this sort of market.

In our space, logos drive credibility... and you need credibility if you're dealing with people's sales emails.

I can put the Google logo on my site too. How does that make me credible?

I'm not trying to be harsh generic SAAS salesforce clones are a dime a dozen these days.

It's not about the software, it's your customers/network + your ability to sell it that will make or break this type of product.

we're not actually competitive with salesforce - most of our business comes from our email integration products with existing CRM systems; in other words, we're not exactly a CRM.

search for "email" on appexchange.com (Salesforce's app store)

My knee jerk reaction was - fight or flee? As others have pointed out if I don't see what the page is about almost immediately I just close it. When skimming through the site the only thing I see is boring business talk which quite frankly bores the hell out of me.

Another thing I noticed on my second visit was how absolutely crammed it was. There are links everywhere, which is fine, but they're screaming 'Hey Look at Me!' and the next 'No Look at Me!' and so on. A clean page goes a long way for me but yours went the other way I'm afraid.

After ten seconds on the website, and reading 1-4 on your banner, I'm not sure what you do or how to buy it.

I think I can track sales leads and data over multiple platforms (salesforce, gmail, etc).

I also don't understand why I'd need an assistant after I loaded calendar events into gmail. I already get reminders.

I'm not trying to be a wise guy, just giving you my experiences without filter.

The scheduling assistant sends out personalized emails to meeting colleagues reminding them to make your meetings - something like:

"hi, i'm jeniffer schwartz, alex schliker's assistant. i am very persisten about scheduling so you may receive a reminder (or two) from me

i have you scheduled with alex 1/15/2010 at 5pm

-- forwarded email --

blah"

The images load on your site pretty slow for me on a fast connection. If this is systemic you can seriously influence the bounce rate by upgrading your bandwidth or using cdn's. I don't have the study in front of me but I recall reading the average amount of time a person will wait for a page to load before hitting the back button incredibly short. Think about offloading that to s3 or a cdn.

this is useful - thanks. we're using a tiny 256 meg instance for our static files (images, etc).

What is it running? You should consider nginx for the static stuff if you are not already using it. It really is fast and low memory usage on a small server such as that.

Edit: Looking at your source here are two suggestions:

The load time is getting hurt by the 75 requests for small images in the success area. You should consider an ajax approach that lazy loads those images and doesn't request a ton of images. If that is too much just pick 5-10 randomly and serve just those on each page load. No one is going to wait through the 75 success stories without clicking on the link.

Also, you should minify the javascript and css to cut down on requests and request size.

Just had another look after first looking at it a few hours ago. Wow! what a difference.

Changes I noticed: * Looks far less cluttered * Video now works for me (didn't work previously) * minor text/layout changes

All in all looks much improved. The video explains things much better then the page itself, I think, although I'm not exactly target audience.

Good luck :)

thanks for the comments - i agree, the cover page is much improved.

I'd reword that "sales scheduling, email to crm syncing, customer followups" like this:

Schedule sales Sync email to CRM Follow up with customers

I think bullets would be good too, because I thought it was "sales scheduling email to CRM, syncing customer followups" or something like that. It was confusing.

bullets are good - just added them.

Your homepage tells me I can "access my sales conversations anywhere" but doesn't tell me what you're selling.

right - i think i've addressed this one in one of the other comments... good point.

Maybe I'm dense, but what is it? A service, a product, a what? Does it replace Salesforce?

it basically records relevant sales emails into salesforce leads and contact records so you know exactly who's been contacted and who hasn't.

You shouldn't have to be telling people what it is in the comments is probably where he was headed with his "what is it" comment.

it's surprisingly useful interacting with you guys - i may actually use my "what it is" comment on the site.

I would agree that you should be more clear about what your service does. Not trying to rip on you or anything. Just trying to help. It's not easy to get your concept across quickly, and it takes a lot of time to nail it concisely, but you should be able to sum it up in a few sentences and maybe with a super-short demo video.

So it looks at emails and sorts them into a pile of people to contact and people to follow up with?

Triggers an immediate back button reflex. Maybe it looks too much like very unfun business stuff. No idea what it is about either - I suppose you only understand it if you are in the business?

Redo the audio on your video with a decent microphone! It sounds bad and the echo is distracting and makes it harder to listen to.

Edit: also, it sounds like you're shouting at me.

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