We're trying out a splash page. | Hacker News Reader

We're trying out a splash page.

phome.us

4 pointspetervidani10 comments

I run a homepage manager with my friend and we look at 2 very concrete statistics: signups and clicks (on the homepages). We wanted to see if we could increase our adoption rate, so we revamped our splash page.

We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?

Did anyone else feel slightly nauseous from the wavy boxes around the normally aligned text? Or is it just me? :)

I spent about 15-20 seconds looking at the page, and had no idea what this service does. You need to make it more obvious, even for not-so-smart users like me.

But I like the design.

You make a homepage (it's easy) with your bookmarks, and then you get notified on the homepage when a link has an update.

One more vote for the confused user... I had to read the "Get to the sites you always visit, and see when they are updated" several times to even guess what your site does.

Are you talking about a bookmark repository (ok, "homepage") that somehow tells you when there is new stuff on your bookmark?

If that is the case, shouldn't you put a sample image on this screen that shows how the homepage looks like, including the one that tells you a site has been updated?

Ok, but your questions was about a splash screen :-) ... It looks good, but don;t call it a splashscreen. The word brings up awful memories of sites that forced you to wait a minute or two over dial-up just to display some image that told you nothing except to click to get to where you really wanted to go. Your screen has a lot more than that, it is actually useful.

As far as homepages that look very different than the rest of the site, this is a good thing. Lots of entertainment-related sites use them, and they are overall a good thing. The homepage engages the visitor, makes a good impression, and the rest of the site is actually the useful part. Yours is pretty good, it's just the wording I had an issue with.

Interesting. We thought it was very self-explanatory, but maybe we have just been too immersed in it. It's a homepage (in the sense of your browser's starting page) which holds links to the sites you always visit.

It auto discovers the RSS feed and periodically checks them, but we never refer to it as "RSS feeds" on the site. We tried to abstract that process as much as possible, so it becomes like any other toggle button.

That's exactly what we were going for, to hook them and pull them to step two (which will hopefully pull them to step three, and so on). Now that we have the format, we plan on continuing to tweak the copy until we find something that works.

Same here, especially on a 13 inch screen (macbook) I could only see half the page.

"and I totes love it."

Huh? Totes? What? I guess I'm just not cool enough for this site.

Yeah, that got a chuckle out of me too... But a quote is a quote :) Better to leave it exactly as said.

Your tagline on top doesn't make sense to me, I don't get what the product does and it just confused me a bit more, apart from that confusion the design looks fabulous

Also love the Totes quote .. what the?

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