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Comment by polarix | Hacker News Reader

I actually can't tell which parts of that page are ads and which are the real content.

I got the same feeling from a couple of comments in this thread

That's the way I feel every time I step into a HN thread about either a company being bought out or a company making their debut on HN. The almost instant responses of glowing reviews and praise for the service seem suspicious, but I have no way of knowing if the product/service really is that good or if the product/service has some dedicated fans commenting for them. It really is hard to tell the difference. I get accusations that I must work for Microsoft all the time because I'm one of the few people who don't hate everything they do. Since I'm well aware of the false positive rate for calling out paid comments, I tend to just not say anything even when I'm suspicious of another commenter. It is possible to just truly like the product/service being talked about.

For the record, both of the people who have praised Swiftype in this thread are actual Swiftype customers, and both of them have written about Swiftype on their own sites (without prompting from us).

http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-inte...

http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-d...

What can I do to make it clearer? Got any suggestions?

I mentioned 3 sponsors in that interview: Walker Corporate Law, Grasshopper & Shopify

Swiftype is not a sponsor. I've never gotten any money from them.

Okay, looking at this again, it's clear that the video/transcript has the good stuff. However:

1. the top banner is too big

2. between it, and the talk of free/premium, and the hype-sounding stuff in the short intro, somehow this pattern-matches to scammy sites for me, and without watching the video I'm expecting it to be minute after minute of buildup with contentless up-selling.

3. Having the transcript in a scrolling box makes it harder to notice that it's actually a representation of what I want, especially when:

4. Leading with the sponsors is really tough. I expect to see sponsors at the end, after I'm appreciative of what the content was. Seeing them at the beginning just annoys me and makes me feel like they're in the way of what I'm trying to do. Since the earlier hooks triggered negative heuristics for me, I didn't power through, and never got to the good stuff.

Hope that's more constructive.

That page feels very spammy.

Why? What part of my site feels spammy?

I think it's all the embedded content and the huge banner (that somewhat unrelated to the headline) at the top, etc is not really meshing together.

The site design could use a bit of love.

The primary issue is that the design is very obviously driven by the goal of monetization. On my laptop, the top half of the page is dominated by the navigation bar at the top (starting with "Premium Membership") and the "Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs" box, featuring a giant "Go Premium?" button, which ends up being right in the middle of the page. I'd estimate that <20% of the space above the fold is useful content.

In addition, there are a number of polish issues that exacerbate the spammy feeling caused by what I described above. There's an escaping bug in the title of the login widget on the right side ("YOU\'RE LOGGED OUT"). You use a number of different background colors (the search widget has a blue one, the "What's new here" has an off-white one). There are too many groups of social media buttons (on the left of the main container, under the search box, under the video clip). There are a lot of horizontal and vertical separators, and they have differing styles and amounts of padding.

Hope that helps!

masthead/call to action is too tall (occupies too much of the above-the-fold on my laptop)

    #header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ }

sidebar is too wide, relative to the width of the content.

    #side { width: 210px; }
    #main { width: 745px; }

these adjustments obviously require other adjustments, but try them out to see how it feels less claustrophobic.

edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U

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