Ask HN: Why the splashpage trend? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why the splashpage trend?

1 pointmarkkat5 comments

It seems a trend that every new service has a colorful billboard page with a big sign up button. Personally, I'm usually not in the mood for a product tour, I want to poke around before I sign up.

I'm curious, am I in the minority? Why the trend?

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After serious amounts of A/B testing, this was the generalized result. A result that is comforting to an user. A result that makes an user agree to decide this is the service they want to try, and be sent to a page with payment options. Resulting in a higher conversion ratio, because the user already has the mindset they wanted to try this service.

Personally, the almost flash looking website portals are really annoying to me. My non geek friend eats them up.

Ah, A/B. I have to wonder if the efficiency can be generalized as much as it seems to be in use.

Are the silly cartoon creatures part of A/B too? :P I do hope this runs its course.

When I first saw the cartoon characters, they were used to display meta information about sites. Overviews, brief tutorials, etc. Now, its just somewhat morphed into the norm. Just imagine if you're a programmer with no design ideals! You look around at other startups and see this antialiased design with bright colors and characters all over the screen and jquery mayhem. You look at the successful sites and the failures and see a theme in both. Its a bandwagon. Shrug. I know I was in this situation. I wanted to design a site and saw minimalism, bright colors and huge cartoons everywhere. I adapted with much restraint.

>Shrug. I know I was in this situation. I wanted to design a site and saw minimalism, bright colors and huge cartoons everywhere. I adapted with much restraint.

:D I have to admit, I had to resist the same influences.

Conversely, some times I have zero interest in reading a companies blog, or what awards they won from PC Magazine back in 1999. You make it sound like a lot of these websites even have more to offer? Sometimes a product is just a product. A download link and a screenshot.

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