Hacker News Reader

Comment by pun_Krawk | Hacker News Reader

I take issue with the current 'standard' design, but only indirectly. I feel like giant home screens give companies the freedom to create a great looking webpage without any actual content - like a giant landing page. Since they all look the same, it's easy to compare and contrast.

I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product actually does. I see a huge banner image, coordinating colors, tons of whitespace, very high-level text content...but little that says, "Our product will specifically do this, that, and the next for you!". I have to click around to find that out. By that time, I'm quite annoyed, and I'm not sure if your product is worth my effort.

Maybe my expectations of a home page are wrong though.

View on HN

"I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product actually does."

This seems to be a major problem lately with startups, especially ones promoted on YC. The home page is often one big image with a little vague text and a "sign up" button. Half the time you can't even tell if it's a shipping product, or much about what it does.

There are people who will click on anything, so this strategy looks, at first, like it's working. ("We have a zillion users and signups! We're ready for another financing round!") As the clickbait advertising industry has discovered, the click on everything crowd does not buy much. Most clicks come from about 10% of users, and they're not the users with money.

I find it's often easier to find out what a company does by doing a quick Google search, than to figure it out from their website.

Me too. If the company is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, usually the article's first paragraph tells you what you want to know of the company much better than its landing and About page.

When it comes to 'landing pages' (where describing the purpose of a company or product is the goal), I think the problem is primarily that it's just really hard to do right, content-wise. The visual design is at most a secondary problem.

A more general-purpose home page has it's challenges, of course, but often it's really just about showing something pretty and guiding users to pages such as 'pricing', 'buy/shop', 'contact', 'about us', etc.

A landing page, on the other hand, is basically the same as creating an ad or a commercial. You have a limited time to 'sell' something, and the fact that you need a page for it means that it's not immediately obvious what you're selling. You have to write ad copy, consider the visuals, target audience, selling points, etc. This is much more difficult than just having a few pages that do very specific things, and a home page that points to them.

A few days ago I wanted to check pricing/features of linode, so I googled linode and clicked on the first link:

http://welcome.linode.com/features/

This gave me 0% of what I wanted and no way to get there, I was confused before I realized it was just a glorified shitty landing page.

Fuck them for trying to scam me into creating an account and making me waste my time, I thought.

Finding out what they do is a fairly unusual need though, right? When I look up a company website (rarely) I'm not looking to find out what they do, typically. My use cases are something like: I want to order something, I want info on a specific product they sell, I want support for something that has gone wrong, or rarely I may be looking for info on working there. I typically know what they do before going to their site, otherwise I wouldn't be there in the first place.

In fairness though, whilst people's needs when visiting a company homepage vary, they're almost never "admire almost-full-screen header image, read bullet points beneath 3 icons selected more for layout purposes than because they convey the most useful information" which is what the design trend discussed in the article optimises for.

A side effect of the current design trend is that navigating to a specific piece of information, or seeing what's changed usually takes another click or a lot more scrolling precisely because the actual products and support contacts are relegated to a lower priority than the full screen "We make software (and have good taste in stock photos)" message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com