I've been completely unable to gain traction for isshort.com, with 43 visits to the site in about 5 days.
1. The landing page does not tell what the service is for and who is it for.
On the first look, it looks like just another URL shortener - but why would I use it over something like 3.ly or j.mp?
2. I tried to read the explanation but bored out. I don't care what "healthy link shortening" is or what rev="canonical" does. The blog post is longwinded and filled with jargon and terms I don't understand. "Publisher"? Am I a "publisher"? Do I want to be? What is the target audience? Am I in the target audience? It's difficult to find out.
3. I put in "google.com" and out comes INVALID_URI.
4. Not having a "Submit" button feels somehow awkward. I'm not sure what I should do in order to shorten the URL. I eventually discovered that pressing Enter and clicking on the "isn't short" text works, but I'd feel better with a "Submit" button.
It's a serious mistake to disallow shortening TLDs like "google.com", because that's what people are likely to type in to test the service. It's deadly to ever let a user see a hostile, wholly uninformative error message like "INVALID_URI".
Owing to unnecessary ajax and a submit button which doesn't reflect presses, if I fail with google.com and then try yahoo.com, there's no indication that the site has received or acted on my second attempt.
Labeling your only button with an image, in an oddball font, using text that's both passive voice and a negative statement, is not OK, as you implicitly acknowledge in the introductory blog post, when you have to tell your potential users which piece of screen real-estate to click.
I knew what rev=canonical and friends were, and even I didn't have any idea what the phrase "healthy link shortening" meant to you. I thought it might have been a point about not relying on the Libyan government. The introductory blog post isn't doing its job. The list of sites with their own shorteners should be on the front page, and should be longer — that's how you connect the site's value with potential users.
The service itself is useful, though I'd most like to see it incorporated into Twitter clients like Hibari, which use bit.ly for everything. Evangelizing an API is harder. Good luck.
I will work on explaining this a bit better.
3. Thanks again. I wasn't aware of that. It's bit.;y's error message, not mine.
4. I will implement a submit button soon.
Healthy link shortening is a 'nice to have', not something most folks will go out of their way to us.
Personally, I wouldn't start using a new tool for the benefit of the web in general when there's an immediate benefit to me for using a competing product. There's got to be a user benefit besides improving the web.
You're confused about who I consider my user. My target audience is a developer, not an end user. The web page is only there as a demo; the product is the API.
Publishers would like people to use their shortener, but that doesn't give developers anything.
Most consumers don't care. Some do, and prefer bit.ly because they trust it (and they like the intelligence it gives them)
If you're going to build something, throw it live, and hope people find it, you're going to need to make sure it's something people will actually be looking for. There are lots of things like that. There are actually only a few that aren't, and unfortunately you've picked the biggest one.
For what I got, you use the shortener of each website (if available) to generate a short URL. Like use youtu.be for YouTube URLs and default to j.mp otherwise.
You claim on the front page to be a different kind of URL shortener and with my first try it seemed to be just as any other URL shortener. You give a long link, it makes a short link.
You should maybe put a concise text on the homepage about what it does and why it's better. Not in a super long blog post that starts by saying when people use URL shorteners
UI is a bit weird — there is no submit button, no progress for the magic ajaxy thing.
Page that explains what it's about starts with mix of obviousness and downsides.
2. There is a submit button. The "isn't Short" image is a button. I'll fix that soon. Also, I'll add a progress bar. Is that something that's really detracting from people using the site, though?
3. How would you restructure the blog post about it?
If button gives click feedback and you can shorten in 1-2 seconds, then you might not need a progress bar.
Explain on the page, in something that can be read in 4 seconds, what is that any why should anybody use it (problems you solve that others don't).
Assume nobody reads the blog post.