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Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

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Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#221

Post by ommunist »

moeamaya wrote: post #207
Gustomaximus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing any existing pages or stats from the original page this claim is weak bravado. I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.

Even more than bravado, I’ve dedicated my entire life’s work to this claim. Design is incredibly undervalued on HN, and I make contrarian claims to not only ruffle a few feathers, but because it’s a fundamental thesis of mine. Note aesthetics are also a functional beauty to me, I enjoy both refactoring code and typesetting a landing page as part of the design process.

up for that. This is probably because design value cannot be easily quantified and gives too much space to office politics, both things are not what many HN people like.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#222

Post by Silhouette »

aaronbasssett wrote: post #193
Silhouette wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read further down the Twitter feed, it's clear that this particular person didn't think she'd granted such permission, and the whole setup looks questionable on other grounds as well. Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions, and then trying to argue that it's obviously a…

I did read the entire thread, the site developer offered two different solutions. But the other commenters seemed to dismiss both suggestions, preferring to fetch their pitchforks instead.

I'm not sure I'd consider anything he suggested a good solution, though.

What he's done, and the aggressive/dismissive way he's handled a perfectly reasonable request afterwards, are what very expensive defamation lawsuits are made of. That is as it should be, IMHO, given that notwithstanding the developer's personal opinions about visitors understanding, the consequences of his actions demonstrably did reach someone close to the person whose photo was used and cause real distress and concern.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#223

Post by komali2 »

bonellia wrote: post #191
komali2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody that's done a/b testing for a Japan audience can relate to this. I'll never pretend to sympathize with the nation's need for ten million characters of 8pt font spaghetti sprayed over every page, but I have long ago accepted it.

Could you give us some examples of those? Since I don't browse websites in Japanese, I have no clue what that looks like. Thanks in advance.

Hah, YES! This will be fun :)

So, it's calmed down a bit, but here's the homepage for rakuten, the biggest ecommerce site in japan. Nothing too out line, except the very Japanese block-ads on the top of the page and running down the right side: https://www.rakuten.co.jp/

See also the "superdeal" page (this may expire) https://event.rakuten.co.jp/superdeal/?l-id=top_normal_flash...

Notice the quick scrolling banner, the word "DEAL" in english sprawled everywhere (with SUPAAAAA!!! in Japanese before it) lots of different color background blocks with white/black/red text over it. Very much the "assault the senses" style of Japanese advertisement.

The watch ad, for example. "50% OFF!" "ONLY UNTIL 4/2 9:59!!!" "GET 20% POINTS BACK!" "SUPER DEAL!!!!"

Here's the relatively more calm website for book-off, the largest retailer of books in Japan. I think reading is more popular in Japan as a hobby though I don't have empirical data as evidence, just my personal observation. Maybe I only think this way because the cities are more dense. Anyway: https://www.bookoff.co.jp/ scrolling banners with many colored backgrounds and different font colors, lots of "ZERO YEN!" kind of stuff, lots of different font stylings, sizes, etc. Controlled Chaos.

Notice also the prototypical "block style" ads all down the page. We probably think of them as "grids" or "cards" in the web dev world these days but they've been doing this on japanese internet since the 90s and it harkens to Japan print ads, magazines etc.

Ah, here we go, I knew Don Quixote (or Quijote) wouldn't disappoint. Right down to the url: "donki.com" lol http://www.donki.com/ not https note

GIANT banner ads scrolling at the top, as of now we've got a black and white one, sliced through with angled images. Simple model photo after that, another one but with a very blue background, then fourth one BOOM that classic Don Quixote eye assault, complex golden background with streamers, Japanese equivalent of comic sands with tilted font in all sorts of colors and sizes, the Don Quixote... penguin? screaming at you. Scroll down for more madness.

Thanks for asking me to do this, I haven't taken a peek at Japanese ecommerce sites in a while. In-person ads have hardly changed in Japan (I was there last week for the sakura) but it's clear to me that the web design styling has calmed down remarkably. If you ever get a chance to pick up some Japanese classifieds, you can get an even better sense of what we used to deal with :)

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#225

Post by reificator »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #158
reificator wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet: http://i.imgur.com/Q3mkcnl.gif

Try and add 2 ethereum amounts correctly without using a library. They have 18 decimal places.

DECIMAL(38, 18) in SQL should do nicely for that.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#226

Post by andkon »

moeamaya wrote: post #207
Gustomaximus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing any existing pages or stats from the original page this claim is weak bravado. I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.

Even more than bravado, I’ve dedicated my entire life’s work to this claim. Design is incredibly undervalued on HN, and I make contrarian claims to not only ruffle a few feathers, but because it’s a fundamental thesis of mine. Note aesthetics are also a functional beauty to me, I enjoy both refactoring code and typesetting a landing page as part of the design process.

I feel like my original answer ended up playing to that tendency to undervalue design here. Which ain't great. I guess my point was that it's super easy to look at a design and feel like it looks great and miss the fact that design is developed closer to the conclusion of a process that begins with developing a compelling message and story. Because folks miss that, "what's a great landing page?" is a question that usually ends up delivering a lot of landing pages that look the dopest, appeal to the most people, whose design and message is accessible, rather than landing pages that are actually successful at doing what they need to do (which may fly right by folks not in the intended audience).

Fwiw, I think you're right. 3x is probably what the match of design and message results in, especially because a lot of what software does can't be described merely in words. It needs design to put the accent on the right things, or else will fail to communicate (most of the time).

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#228

Post by paulcole »

Silhouette wrote: post #188
aaronbasssett wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have permission though. The people used granted permission when they submitted their face to uifaces.com, in fact they even went so far as to submit their faces to the "authorised" section on uifaces > those awesome folks allow their faces to be used on live products They might not have ever imagined that their faces would be used in this manner, but they did give their permission.

If you read further down the Twitter feed, it's clear that this particular person didn't think she'd granted such permission, and the whole setup looks questionable on other grounds as well. Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions, and then trying to argue that it's obviously a…

> Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions

This was the plot of a Friends episode like 20 years ago. Joey's face is used in a herpes ad in the subway.

I think he got paid but the issue is the same. Give someone carte blanche to use your likeness and there might be some negative consequences.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#229

Post by majewsky »

moeamaya wrote: post #207
Gustomaximus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing any existing pages or stats from the original page this claim is weak bravado. I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.

Even more than bravado, I’ve dedicated my entire life’s work to this claim. Design is incredibly undervalued on HN, and I make contrarian claims to not only ruffle a few feathers, but because it’s a fundamental thesis of mine. Note aesthetics are also a functional beauty to me, I enjoy both refactoring code and typesetting a landing page as part of the design process.

> Design is incredibly undervalued on HN

Looks like we're reading different HNs.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of great landing pages?

#230

Post by saagarjha »

pc86 wrote: post #197
saagarjha wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? Does everything have to be a moneymaker? Like you said, this would be trivial to setup yourself. It's a nice piece of software that provides some advertising for his other products.

Go to the link in the comment...

Ah, I didn't realize that this was a reference to the Dropbox comment. Gotcha.
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