david

#20515

created: 1067 days ago

I guess that's what I get for lurking...

So you can go on web forums and say "Well I really don't see it so you must be cheating with some JS stuff...".

It's nice that the conversion rate went up, but it would be a mistake to attribute the change to removing content, when there were many improvements to the overall design of the landing page as well.

I would say this is a lesson in the value of thoughtful design much more than in simply removing unnecessary content.

Makes sense. I think most of the time your body should know what sleep schedule is best for your health better than you do. I tend to just wait until I feel ready to go to sleep, be it 10PM or 2AM, and get up when I feel well rested.

You're right, letting people drown is a much better solution.

We can already talk over the internet, putting it in a website isn't really that revolutionary.

Telling your people your competition sucks isn't unethical, you're just making them aware that you can provide them with more value. If you can't live up to your claims, you'll feel the backlash.

I can see that using Mechanical Turk could be unethical for certain sites (e.g: dating sites), but it could also be pretty useful, and was something I hadn't thought of at least.

Also, I don't see how your complaint about #5 applies to blogs but not twitter or facebook sites.

It looks much more natural in fixed-width fonts too, using quotes like that here kind of defeats the purpose.

I think he may have been saying something like "If you pull everything off just right, there's a maximum of 5% of your visitors that can turn into sales".

Of course, if the majority of your traffic are coming over to read something interesting, you'll probably be a ways from meeting that 5% mark.

Maybe if you were running a service, you'd be better off evaluating how well your prices are doing by selling multiple plans and paying attention to their relative sales behind the scenes. If only your cheapest plan is selling, you're probably priced to high, and if your cheapest plan is ignored, you might be priced to low.

I don't know if the higher price sending a signal is all that relevant, since you would basically just be changing the price in whatever direction will maximize revenue. If the high-value signals end up producing more or less sales, you would just see that in the results.

You would definitely mix up the whole perception of your prices though.

I think that's the biggest challenge with this approach: figuring out how users will react to the price changes. Someone who goes to a site and sees an ebook listed for $8.95 is going to perceive that price a lot differently than someone who sees an ebook for $8.95 and knows that it's been going up from $5.25 for the past couple weeks.

I've actually been a fan of IA's template for a while, even though they keep updating it. It's one of the best examples I know of a well-executed minimalist design, the overall grid layout, and the attention to detail makes everything work.

Well, knowing that you applied to YC in the first place, you must have thought on some level that they are more experienced and/or better at making these kinds of evaluations than yoursel(f|ves).

I would at least be interested, then, to hear from YC why they gave you such a low valuation, just to be sure you're not missing something important. Then you can make you're own decision as to whether YC's logic makes sense or not.

I'd say it's a sore spot on the otherwise tasteful ubuntu design.

protip: replace with

    <table with="35em">

>> Do such systems really not exist today?

ext2?

Irk, I've found that freelancers have the exact same problem. The better deal you offer someone, the more demanding they get and the more they are convinced that you're ripping them off.

I just forward *@mydomain.com to gmail. Having web software you can put up on your personal server is nice, but it poses a whole different set of challenges to just hosting it yourself.

You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out.

Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges.

This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel.

If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.

I don't think one of my favorite (OOPish) flavors was included. I think of it as something like designing an organism out of various independent parts, figuring out how they will work together and respond to input.

For me a lot of more complicated UI design is like this, I have objects representing each part of the interface and spend a lot of time sending messages between objects and figuring out how to handle user events. I guess the focus isn't so much on algorithms or if-statements so much as high-level architecture.

I guess that's kind of the dilemma. On the one hand, you could totally re-do these sites to be appealing and useful to their users, but if you're focus is on getting ad revenue more than actually being useful to people, that's doing the opposite of what you want. There's no reason for the owner to be dishonest here either, even if he provides "decent content", it's easy to see that's not why he made these websites.

But on the other hand, optimizing your design for clickthroughs is also a pretty good way to get blacklisted, so the design that works best for making money off of visitors, is also a long ways from being the best layout for getting more visitors to your site.

You have a bunch of web sites with the same poor-quality layout that are dominated by ads, that's pretty much the definition of a spam ring, and I don't see why it's so surprising that google would want to limit clickthroughs to your sites.

I'd say the best way to improve you're score would be to get a good design that looks legitimate, and content-focused, and try to vary the designs of your other sites to look more like you are actually providing something other than the same ad links people were looking at when they clicked through to your site.

Right, if someone were trying to use this information to, say, cut down on their news.yc surfing, they'd probably be better off not worrying about dopamine and just focusing on the actual net-addiction behaviors and feelings they are actually experiencing.

Thinking "I should do X, because the dopamine levels in my brain are changing" is probably going to be less effective and more ambiguous to you compared to thinking "When I click a link on news.yc I feel X, when I tell myself maybe I should stop ycing and work on something else I feel y, so maybe I could try z".

As if the cost of carrying out the wrong call isn't too high either?

The worst case isn't that soldiers' time is squandered or that they risk their lives over nothing worthy, it's that they kill and destroy needlessly, but I guess we don't really tend to come to terms with that fact as well as the people we're fighting.

The politicians only exist because of the troops. The republican party isn't going to launch an attack against you themselves just because you didn't follow the rules.

That doesn't really make sense. The only reason Britains involvement in Iraq was possible is because there were a bunch of servicemen ready to go out and murder for the man.

What exactly are you thanking the serviceman for if not for carrying out acts you oppose? And how are we ever going to stop politicians from starting some pretty horrendous wars if we can only thank the armies who's job is to carry out their orders, no matter how awful.

Money is just a medium of exchange. If I'm most productive as a fisherman, and currently I want a new wooden table more than anything else, I'm much better off if I can spend three hours fishing in exchange for enough money to buy a table, rather than spend 10 hours trying to come up with something I can trade the table-maker directly, or spending 20 hours trying to make a table myself.

The author made the association between working for money and dissociation from the actual value of the products your using. So he might say that since you didn't spend so much time making the table yourself, you would be too distanced from the impact of throwing that table out or from the amount of resources and labor that are going to be needed for making a new table.

I don't think that makes sense, whether it costs you a week of labor to build a table, or a day to go fishing for a table, the cost to you isn't any less precise. All you really get by doing away with money is inefficiency and less free time. If that's how you enjoy spending your time, so be it, but that doesn't have anything to do with the way millions of other people prefer to spend their time.

The real factor that leads to dissociation from the actual cost/impact of stuff in consumers' minds isn't money, it's any of the costs/expenses that for political reasons are prevented from influencing the price of the final product. So for example if farmers are given subsidies and are protected by tariffs against competing goods, people are going to be a lot more wasteful with their food than they should be, or if people are allowed to spread pollution without having to pay for it, the environmental costs are not going to be accurately reflected in the price of their products.

But I guess trying to crack that problem is a lot harder than living in a trailer and making your own bread.

Of course visual design always comes second to the quality of the actual product/experience, but that doesn't mean design isn't important.

A company's brand is a reflection of their user experience. The main contributer to Coca-Cola's brand, then, is in the actual drink itself. Graphic design, logo design, or identity design is important not because it can really alter the branding or make a bad product look good, but because they can make that branding more apparent to someone before they even take a sip, and guide them towards whatever decisions happen to be the most profitable for Coca-Cola.

So for example, a good Coca-Cola logo would give people the idea that coke is more refined/sophisticated, and is made to be appealing throughout the entire drink, instead of sacrificing total experience for a short rush of sugar flavor. That would get the attention of people who are looking for that sort of drink, and filter out the people who might be better served by pepsi. Whereas, if they had a logo that lead to a greater feeling of spectacle than sophistication, it would be more likely that people who wouldn't appreciate coke would try it (deciding they don't like it and going back to pepsi), and the people who would buy coke would be less likely to consider it.

That's why logo design is important. You may have a great product, but if your visual identity doesn't reflect that, your marketing efforts will be spent fighting against your image rather than running alongside it.

Slime is one of the things I miss most when writing scheme.

It would also help if the link to "Twilio.com" up top didn't point to "blog.twilio.com".

If you're asking $175 for a landing page, you probably do need to ask for more.

Maybe I don't understand the whole Google+China issue, but if you can do business with people you disagree with, can't Google do business with China?