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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

You really need a real home page. Having a guest account they can play with is awesome ... but it's not a good way to start it off.

When I come to the site for the first time, the first thing I see is an unexplained empty calendar. That's very confusing. You need a "this is what mealfire is and why it's cool" page.

UX is nice. I really like the way you do bulk-adding of ingredients and directions.

Nice idea. I can definitely see using it once I'm responsible for my meals.

Bottom-line, everything is good but the very-first impression, which is what's most important.

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Yeah, it's always been my intention to have a real home page, but I've never been able to figure out what it would be. I've got an about page with a bunch of text, but who wants a wall of text or a sales pitch when they hit a site? It may be a good idea to put a brief description of the site in the guest bar at the top.

>but who wants a wall of text or a sales pitch when they hit a site?

It may be a fine line, but I've noticed myself hitting a lot of new sites thinking "why don't they just tell me what it is/does and show me some screen shots before I have to sign up?"

I think it's a big deal. I almost always pass without it.

The best approach may be to cookie return visitors and then redirect them to the example, with a way for them to get back to the original LP if possible (landing page).

I whipped up a home page and deployed. The more I thought about it the better the idea sounded.

It's already a big improvement and I realize you just threw this up, so that's especially impressive. I'd suggest making the list of major features more "scan-able", perhaps by listing the features in bullet points, or just creating a tour. Also, I'm a tad confused on this point, but if it costs $5 to register (for the non HN crowd anyway), I haven't seen mention of that anywhere on the site...that's probably something people should find out before clicking "register".

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