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Ask HN: Feedback on my new web app please

cli.gs

21 pointspierrefar34 comments

Please don't take this the wrong way -- but you need a designer to go over your site. There are font inconsistencies, weird graphics, and the color scheme doesnt work well in its current implementation. I've been guilty of this as well, but your site would be better without any graphics (just text/css) than with poor graphics.

Some other notes:

- Less Is More. You dont need that much text on the homepage. It would be much better to make it a simple 1. "X", 2. "Y", 3. "Z". Put all the answers to the weird questions in a FAQ.

- Easy to read means Easier to use. You have no need for a 100% width layout, in fact it kind of makes it weird. This is just design opinion, see comment about designer above. 100% can work if it is laid out correctly.

- Thought of using email address as username? Makes logging in and signing up a little easier.

- Passwords. "Your password is valid and has been accepted but a bit weak. You can make it stronger by adding characters like &, *, ! and others." Thats fucking weird man. This isnt a site with secure information, in my opinion, so the password is pretty trivial here. If you want stronger passwords, enforce them, dont remind someone they are being stupid but do nothing about it.

- AJAX / Javascript. Its not just to make things prettier (although that would also be a benefit here). You can do live validation of fields and you dont have to update the whole page if something goes wrong.

- What the hell is the "Skip to navigation menu and content" Link at the very top. Weird. Bad.

- Dont you want to validate their email address before you let them post?

- Make your home page after logging in a list of existing "cligs" with links to create a new one. No need to make me click an extra time to view my existing cligs. Think craigslist style if you need mental picture.

- Your site doesnt validate. Thats bad. see http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcli.gs%2F

- You have a lot of CSS tags that read like "delicious-blogbadge-tall". Is that yours? or stolen? Not accusing, but the naming conventions seems weird for your site.

- How do I close my account? These things need to be obvious, not explained. - How do I delete a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained. - How do I edit a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained.

The app itself seems to work pretty well, but the current state of the design is totally nuts and will drive a lot of people away/. As such, most of my comments are UI/Design related.

From a business/strategy standpoint, do not spend time re-creating the wheel. Your competitors (including but not limited to is.gd or tinyurl) make using their sites a lot easier. How can you expand upon their model making it better/faster/easier/different? Different is best, as replication + improvement only gets you so far. Right now your solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way. You need an API. You need something that differentiates you.

Keep going! and hire a designer! Good luck.

I had similar issues with my site (though I think it looked a damn site better than yours), trying to read your site, my eye is just going all over the place.

I think you are killing usability by not making things clear and simple.

I used crowdspring to get a new design on my site. Costs a bit, but well worth the time and effort.

Thanks for reminding me crowdspring. Interesting option!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely look into fixing the design given your comments and the comments elswhere, perhaps using crowdspring as suggested.

Not validating is not bad. It's not essential either. Take google.com for example. And the delicious tags are not "stolen" but are the delicious.com badge.

Closing accounts: didn't think of that, but easy enough to add.

Editing and deleting cligs is coming.

Skip to content link is for mobile users. A proper mobile-optimized layout is coming that will be automatically used if a mobile UA is detected and this is a temporary measure. As a mobile net user, I find such links very helpful.

But I think you're missing something important here. You say "Right now your solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way." Tinyurl and is.gd do not offer anywhere near the service Cligs does in terms of analytics. I don't want to belittle them but they don't have top contend with user accounts and layout out a ton of data in a sensible way. So the current design of Cligs doesn't work but that's because it needs to do a lot more.

Thanks again.

OK. So your point of differentiation is Analytics. Good. Would it be possible to still make the creation of new 'Cligs' more streamlined, with the option to sign up later to retrieve/view stats? Just a thought.

API still important, if not critical, in my eyes.

If you havent already, I would do a benchmark of Google Analytics and other free analytics companies and try to see what are the important metrics. "Hits" doesnt really cut it if your differentiation is analytics.

Anywho, Good luck. I think if you clean up the design some, that itself will make the service a lot more attractive/usable and you will see increased activity. Once you get some traction you'll be able to really drive home the rest.

There IS a start-up that has full analytics support, though. I forget which it was, but it measured hits and visits and the like, and it was very easy to use.

For some reason the site is saying that its blocking me due to a "hacking attempt". I don't understand why it is doing this to me I wasn't trying to hack it or anything.

Yeah, so your message is URL Shortener + Analytics.

Two nice rounded image headers, one for each, large ENTER URL HERE box, prompt for registration on entering the URL. What's so complicated?

this is going to sound harsh, but looking at your site, I couldn't care less. I go to a lot of sites, regularly share URLs with people, I'm your target audience, and I'm not interested. It's overwought. It's not that your frontpage needs to do a lot, it's that the page sucks.

If I visit, I want to submit a URL and then get analytics on the flipside. Everything that isn't related to that task is extraneous.

Why not just nuke the entire page, put in a bigass textarea for copying in a url, a submit button, and two small rounded image boxes describing, respectively, URL Shortening and Analytics? You'd have a site that's approximately 10 trillion and a half times better.

It's not that anyone's missing something, it's that your site fails to get across why your site is useful.

All the design you need in a site like this: http://is.gd/ Then one button for analytics.

The idea behind it is one that has an obvious demand, so good for you if you find a way to make money off it.

However, there are a couple of things I don't like about the site design itself:

- The "skip to navigation menu and content" link at the top seems extraneous to me -- I'm not sure of how it looks on lower resolutions, but I can already see those parts of the page.

- Using images for your titles. It's not just an accessibility problem, it's lame. If you browse with a little zoom, compression artifacts are clearly visible, and your "Register FREE" becomes "Register FR."

- The gradient bars are -- to be blunt -- ugly.

Best of luck!

Thanks for the feedback. The skip link is for mobile users as I explained in another comment.

The images and whole design will be looked into from scratch.

Thanks again!

You're making a classic mistake. People are telling you problems, and instead of trying to solve them, you're justifying the reasons. Classic fail.

Good idea (especially if you can persuade somebody to pay you).

Design suggestion: wording on the left hand side is too verbose. You should think about how to get the idea across more quickly, maybe as a three-step pseudo-cartoon.

On the downside, the stuff about SEO makes it sound like your site's primary purpose is evil, and that's sad.

Agreed with the evil bit. If you become popular, what is to stop every major search engine to treat links from your site as a negative (spammy) signal?

Interesting concept ... I like it. URL shortening is definitely something early tech adopters use a lot (I'm not sure about the average Internet user).

You've definitely spelled out the benefits on the home page–but I'll be totally honest: the website design is pretty bad. Simplify, get rid of that laser beam and handwriting font, and clean up the page.

I think you could do some creative things to get traction ... for example, create a FireFox plugin that cligs the current user's URL and posts it to Twitter, Digg, or WordPress. Anything like that which makes it as easy as possible for people to use the service will help adoption.

As for a business model, be creative as well.

Creativity is key as you say. I really like the plugin and extra features ideas. I'll see what about implementing them in a sensible way.

Thanks!

I like it. How about allowing people to use the service before signing up? Obviously the data collected could be public.

I've debated this through-out the development process. Obviously the unique feature here is the private analytics data, and making some cligs public might confuse things.

It's something definitely on my mind but not sure how to deal with it.

I would do it for sure. Most people probably wouldn't care about the links traffic being public, but they will be turned off by a registration process.

Agreed. How about making non sign up links only last a finite length of time?

That would make me not use the service. If I'm short-linking on my blog or Twitter account, I want to know that if someone clicks that link 2 years from now, it will still function.

I actually would be curious to see how many people clicked it (and when) and I usually wouldn't care if other people saw it as well.

I couldn't past the design and immediately closed it. The color scheme is truly awful.

Just have one text field for the url you want to shorten. When the user clicks submit, then give two urls. One is the shortened url, the other is for analytics. Make the analytics url publicly accessible and have a button on that page to make it private -- for a cost!

it's brilliant for rickrolling and other nefarious activities finally I know hom many I got.

But the site design is quite horribly, just remove every element you specifically designed then it's going to be fine.

Remove: http://cli.gs/images/home-page-message.jpg http://cli.gs/images/cligs-logo-black.jpg http://cli.gs/images/home-page-register.jpg

But you could be succesful even if you don't remove those, design is not really a success criterium online.

I disagree. A usable website matters. An Ugly interface matters. Certainly, only to a point -- if shit is broken, it doesnt matter how pretty. Nice interfaces lead to good brand equity which leads to trust which leads to use.

Brian

Nice, but I'm not sure how much "legs" it has in terms of being a business.

Thanks!

I have ideas about how to monetize it like adding premium features and adding up-sell add-on services.

I subscribe to the launch early and launch fast mentality :)

Do those other ones like tinyurl actually bring in money? I'm not very knowledgeable about that 'market'. In any case, getting it out there is a good idea, it looks like it's pretty nice 'as is'.

A URL pointer service with tracking metrics - smart idea, good version 1. I like that the metrics updated immediately after I clicked a link I'd made. The interesting part to me was that it showed relevant Twitter, delicious, etc traffic - for both the cli.gs link and the long URL. Signup was simple and professional. Ignore the people who are expecting a perfect version - you made it clear up front that you're not finished under the hood and haven't applied polish yet. I see you're going to have charts and graphs eventually; nice. I wonder, will you also pull client IP addresses through ip2geo to show maps of visitor traffic? Lots of possible features to add. Congrats on v1 - keep rolling out the reporting tools and polish. If you do, demand for your premium plan should fall into place.

The country mapping is coming along with a lot of other analysis features.

It's V1 as you say and I wanted to get the ball rolling to get some data into the database so I can start working off that - real data is better than hypothetical data :)

i really like the idea. I like it so much that a few months back we launched a similar product. Check out POPrl.com you can also view stats (http://poprl.com/stats/0Kb) among other features. I would love to work together if you're interested.

Interesting. Drop me a message at http://blog.cli.gs/contact and let's talk.

I love HN because of meetups like these!

I like HN because you guys are trying to work together instead of slinging mud at each other's projects ("but my version has foobar widgets!!11!").

(you guys)++

I believe http://bit.ly also works on similar lines: http://switchabit.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/bitly/

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