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Comment by marklabedz | Hacker News Reader

When I visited in Chrome, I wasn't sure what your site offered. When I visited in IE, I got a laugh out of your warning screen, but at least I was able to read the page title - "Advanced Data Collections and Analytics System."

Clicking through the sign up forms, I'm guessing it's analytics targeted at creative groups, but I'm not sure what your competitive differentiator is.

EDIT: After reading your post (looks like we were typing at the same time, I guess it makes sense and I appreciate your efforts to stand out. If I were to mention it to a colleague though, without any other info, I'm guessing said colleague wouldn't stick around long.

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The site is for specifically for touring artists and their management/booking agents/record labels. I can't imagine someone outside of the industry being referred to it, as it's a very specific niche... would it be wrong to assume that 99% of people visiting the site already know what it is? Even with that said, the limitations on the front page should force you down a path that tells you what it is. 4 seconds after the page loads a tip appears saying "What is RELA?" And there's a video tutorial link in the bottom left... with facebook and twitter links at the bottom right (which are pretty much the only things on the page)... all of which explain what it is. I was thinking anyone visiting for the first time would be nearly forced to at least check out one of those things. I mean... they're visiting it for a reason - probably not just some random skim through like people here at HN would do.

Think of it like this - if you go to a site and you know they offer accounting software, that doesnt mean you KNOW their software. You dont know how good it is, or how bad.

If you want to keep it simple, at least inform your users with your video without hiding it - ala Dropbox.

I think you need to make a much bigger effort to win your customers - an empty frontpage with just a sign up/login form will lose you a lot of potential customers. Remember, you're not Facebook yet.

>>would it be wrong to assume that 99% of people visiting the site already know what it is?

Every industry is different, of course, but I think pitching a product/service (however briefly) is always a good thing. Give people an intriguing reason to sign up and see what else is on offer.

Thanks for all your feedback! I'll definitely keep this in mind and do some a/b testing here in the near future.

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