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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

I don't like to be that guy, but your landing page is a tragedy.

It's visually gorgeous, yet completely fails at explaining what the product does and how it's different from the two dozen competitors. Remember rule #1: Show, don't tell (hint: screencast, live-demo).

Don't promise "LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY" when all that follows is cropped screenshots and breathless marketing copy.

ALL YOUR TEAMS ARE A CLICK AWAY, TEAM STATUS & PRESENCE AT A GLANCE, MINIMALLY DISTRACTING GROUP CHAT ...

I can't help but respond: O RLY?

Skype has all that. Minus the breathless marketing copy...

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+1 Live demo, or at least screenshots of the whole thing. Not gonna sign up just to kick the tires.

In a medium of strictly words, "show, don't tell" means that you should use your words to illustrate something, not just describe it.

In a visual medium, I really think that a bunch of screenshots does exactly what "show, don't tell" is trying to counter; you're just 'visually telling', not 'visually showing' (if you'll allow me to bend words). This landing page shows me that this product is something I want to try.

I think you make some fair points. 100% agree we desperately need a better demo on the front page.

I think the landing page needs help, too, but we've gotten mostly positive responses to it. I personally didn't expect this, because I wanted a nice demo and we just flat haven't had time to put one together.

We launched it on the same day as our realtime web app conference (krtconf) and I wrote the bulk of the copy at about 2 a.m. the night before. Not my best work, but no excuses--sometimes you just have to ship! :D

Points taken and rest assured my criticism was only about your landing page, not about the product (I didn't bother to sign up for the above reasons).

Keep up the work, if your product quality can match that of the visuals then you might be onto something. :-)

Edit: Despite the criticism from others in the thread I still like the visual appearance. I just think you overshot a little and forgot that the even the nicest form still needs to follow function.

A brief (snarky) reflection:

"Our team at &yet has been building &! for a year, using and improving it for nearly 6 months."

Approximately %0.00023 of the time spent was on the landing page copy on the night before the deadline. Perhaps a project management system would help here.

You also need a front page that doesn't flip me off for not having a browser that supports web sockets.

Even if your app (whatever it is, I can't even view _text_ about it) requires web sockets you can explain that somewhere else in a less… 'gtfo old man'-kind of way.

(I know you guys tried to soften the blow with the whole we heart websockets cuteness but it was very much a case of "… well, sweet then. Closes tab")

It's even worse if you arrive at the landing page with an old browser: Then the most important thing the team wants to tell you with their single shot at your eyeballs is that they are uber-geeks who love web sockets. Like I, as a potential customer, should care about that.

I'm guessing here, but they should be able to build a landing page that tells me what their product does without needing web sockets to build it. Without it I'm not even going to make the effort to come back later on a browser that they might support just to find out what on earth their offering is.

Landing page optimization is an art, and it takes a long time before you get the wording & design just right.

I think its asking a lot for any new product launch to have a perfect landing page out the gate

There's having a perfect landing page and there's having a decent screenshot that shows what you're promising.

I didn't see enough and came here hoping someone could point me to a demo (sans signup) or better screenshots.

> Landing page optimization is an art

Maybe, but it is also based on very simple common sense rules, like "if you want your words to be read, put them is a font size that is neither too small nor too big for common user at common screen distance with common screen size".

Opening this one landing page in the morning, the words are so big, it is really hurting my eyes. Closed the page. Same with ifttt.com, by the way.

They should cut the misspelling too. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vagary

I had no idea that "vagary" had the same root. I thought "vaguery" was a completely made up word when I wrote it, just like "mindmeldification", etc.

That's it.

I'm hereby turning in all my spelling bee ribbons.

You win, starpilot. You win.

This is why it's good to read books that have editors, because editors know stuff like this and will make sure the final form uses the real word. Then you, as the reader, will learn the word too.

(I was reading the Steve Jobs biography today, and noticed that they wrote the expression "the idea jelled in his mind", where I would have written "the idea gelled in his mind". Thanks to some editor somewhere, I can now look less illiterate when I use that expression.)

I might have viewed a different page than you, but honestly after reading the landing page it was fairly obvious what the product does and how.

Perhaps you're not the target or you don't have the problem this product address?

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