Following their rules would make it cringe-worthy.
Maybe for certain audiences, in certain types of corporate website, their advice is good, but the article doesn't define the domain to which the advice applies.
Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems?
"7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code."
vs
"Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive".
Or, if you're promoting free software:
"You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software".
Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.
Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature".
"With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion.
CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more."
is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :).
As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields.
The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me:
> With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type!
... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about.
> [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...]
Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.
Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level.
It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are.
The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
Not only "regular people", but you too are disproportionally affected by "nicest sounding blurb", and just don't realize it.
Imagine a consultant who offers consulting on using cryptocurrencies as a payment method for your online business. The fees are $250 per hour. You're a paypal user and briefly considered using bitcoins for your online business, but are not sure about it.
Or imagine a physiotherapist who offers a treatment for a very rare (but not life-threatening) condition no traditional medicine could cure. It is rather expensive, but the guy says he can help you, yet you won't find any testimonial on the web because of the rarity of the condition.
But if we're talking food in general, I have a relatively simple algorithm: I try out various price points of any given food category, and then settle on either: 1) for few cases where I care about taste, on the item that tastes best; 2) for everything else, cheapest one that isn't plain disgusting.
So e.g. for soft drinks, I have a strong preference of Pepsi Max > Coca Cola Zero > el cheapo diet cokes, which is based on trying them all out, and which changed over the years (e.g. couple years ago, I used to like one of the cheap brands the best). For cheese, I'll take the cheapest thing you've got that's yellow and is called "Gouda" or "Edam".
Brands are nothing to me beyond a way to distinguish between different tastes.
The implication is that these blurbs are ads preying on the unknowing ;)
Me too. I'd guess most technically minded people will pattern match those two last examples as "company selling bullshit". In contrast, "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio" conveys exactly the information I'm looking for.
Gentoo Linux used to have one of these cringe-worthy blurbs. Something about their mascot Larry the Cow and how he found all other distros "the same" but Gentoo was "different" [1]. It was confusing and embarrassing. Now Gentoo's landing page reads "Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution". I know which one is cleaner and easier to understand!
[1] now they seem to have moved it to a hard to find "about" page, right where it belongs: unseen! https://gentoo.org/get-started/about/
“You running more than one app for compressing files? We were too. Someone sent your a file with a new compression format that you don’t recognize? It’s really frustrating.
We realized that most people need a tool they can reliably encode and decide in the right formats. We created 7-zip to be your trusted go to tool for managing all of your file compression needs. It’s free, open source, and developer friendly.
Let us show you how we can help you and your customers.”
This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it.
Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.
Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.
Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.
When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".
For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ :
"Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software."
There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page:
"7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything."
"You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip."
I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!
That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.