Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

is the "too much text" really a problem? if too much text didn't work, none of those "buy my crappy ebook and make billions like me" sales pages would work.

regarding the designer, if you are just starting out and can't afford one...borrow concepts from your competitors. If you are selling shoes, borrow the design from zappos. Why? Because you know that they've optimized every single thing, since even .5% can cost them millions.

I'm pretty sure that quote is from pg.

And if you want to be a real jackass, you can add an exit pop to your site.

The call to action thing is very important. Most users are very uncertain, if you give them too many options, they'll get confused and won't do anything.

As far as social proof, yes I agree, but it's not that hard to fake the social proof. Nothing is stopping you from adding a Techcrunch image to your site. And if techcrunch bitches...just point them to that completely unrelated comment you made with a link to your site.

overall good post, since I find that pretty much every website will have one of those missing.

"if too much text didn't work, none of those "buy my crappy ebook and make billions like me" sales pages would work."

You're referring to 'long copy' which is wholly different from 'throw a couple of paragraphs of text on my website because I'm too lazy to make it short or replace with graphics'. Writing long copy is a craft, and is structured completely different from the websites in the review.

For one data point, http://ourdoings.com/ got the "too much text" criticism from Paras, but that ugly wall of sentence fragments actually increased conversions relative to the few carefully crafted sentences that were there before.

For more data points, the post that prompted me to uglify my front page in this manner was Don Norman's: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659020

That said, I'm grateful to Paras. A couple of the feedback items are ones I expect to be very helpful, though I haven't tested them yet.

Yeah, my advice was based on what I thought could work best. But the best idea is to do an A/B test (and not implement best practices directly). I'm glad you liked my feedback.

>> is the "too much text" really a problem?

Yes. Even though I read the entire article, the captions for the graphics combined with the graphics themselves provided such a clear, concise summary of good and bad examples for each bullet point that I immediately understood the meat of the detailed text surrounding it.

The graphics and accompanying captions in the article itself serve as a nice TL;DR which reinforces the author's earlier point of one way of fixing the "Too much text" problem:

...Instead of extensive “How this works” (consisting of heaps of text), make a simple graphic detailing the process...

Yes "too much text" may be a problem is if it unstructured. Also, if you don't have a designer you can buy one nice-looking template from http://themeforest.net

I would personally never "fake" social proof as (apart from ethical concerns) it may have legal liabilities which a startup cannot afford.

EDIT: Typo in link

I'm not sure about the legal liabilities.

if you add "as seen on Techcrunch", and that's in reference to a comment you made...that's not exactly a complete lie.

yes it's completely unethical, but I don't think it'd be illegal

I think that link should be http://themeforest.net/ ?

Yes. Look up a reference to "no one wants to read your shit" in the google. And it is so true, no one reads your website (or mine either). You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise (at least for getting that initial conversion).

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