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Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

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Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#31

Post by mansigandhi »

citricsquid wrote: post #21
mansigandhi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there. I think there's been a misunderstanding. We're actually launching this week at Stanford (our app has already been approved by Apple). The launch page is to get the email addresses of interested people and to create a pre-launch buzz at the school. We also have our pre-launch marketing on the campus going on.

If you have a launch date a countdown would be great, as would giving some sort of incentive to share.

Yeah, thats a good idea. Will try and see what we can add. Thanks for that!

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#33

Post by NaOH »

mansigandhi wrote: post #16
wilfra wrote: post #7

I think it's fucking gorgeous. On what could be improved: -Too much text in the lower left. You can use less characters and communicate the same thing better. Such as... -'Leave your email and we'll let you know when Shoutt arives' change to 'Request a beta invite' and change from 14px to 18-20px. Alternately, remove this text entirely and change button text from 'Submit' to 'Request Invite'. -Logo could use a bit mo…

Hi Wilfra. Awesome! Thanks for the feedback...really useful. We've changed the "Leave your email..." to "Request a beta invite". And we made the fonts slightly low-key. We'll look into the other changes for the layout and incorporate them.

Two minor tweaks. As long as "An app for you and your campus" is going to be split across two lines, change where the line break is. I'd suggest "An app [line break] for you and your campus." This brings greater emphasis to the idea of "you and your campus," plus it makes that line and everything which follows (beta invite, exclusively at Stanford, and what do you want) increasingly long (left to right), helping the eye move through that part of the page.

Edit: I should add, though I'm seeing it after some other folks have suggested tweaks, I think it looks fantastic. Well done.

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#34

Post by spohlenz »

mansigandhi wrote: post #24
dmerfield wrote: post #20

The following CSS will fit the background image to the page dimensions and eliminate the letter boxing for all viewport ratios. -webkit-background-size: cover; -moz-background-size: cover; -o-background-size: cover; background-size: cover; Before: http://bit.ly/NY7ZtE After: http://bit.ly/POyEaA

Wow thanks! We made the change.

Not quite. You've added those to the body element (inline as well, which is a bad idea), whereas the background is on the #wrapper div. I'd suggest moving the background onto the body element, and adding the background-size definitions to the body element but within your CSS.

With that fixed, it looks very nice indeed.

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#35

Post by mansigandhi »

NaOH wrote: post #33
mansigandhi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Wilfra. Awesome! Thanks for the feedback...really useful. We've changed the "Leave your email..." to "Request a beta invite". And we made the fonts slightly low-key. We'll look into the other changes for the layout and incorporate them.

Two minor tweaks. As long as "An app for you and your campus" is going to be split across two lines, change where the line break is. I'd suggest "An app [line break] for you and your campus." This brings greater emphasis to the idea of "you and your campus," plus it makes that line and everything which follows (beta invite, exclusively at Stanford, and what do you want) increasingly long (left to right), helping the…

Great point. We split it now to be An app for you. And your campus.

Looks good?

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#36

Post by vinaykuruvila »

I like the concept.

We recently A/B tested the hell out of our landing page at Sidelines (http://sidelinesapp.com), so there are some interesting things we learned that may be applicable to you:

1. Coming up with an effective single-sentence explanation of your product will affect your conversion more than anything else. I don’t think you’ve quite nailed it with “An app for you and your campus.” Figure out what the most compelling use-case of your product is and make that clear on your landing page.

2. Make sure your landing page looks great on mobile browsers (especially since yours is a mobile product). Right now, on Safari on my iPhone, I don’t even see the map.

3. I would get rid of “Exclusively at Stanford University”, since I think it will turn off people from other schools. You should experiment with removing it or even better, showing it only if the IP of the person clicking the ad is in the Bay Area.

4. I would get rid of the “What do you want to shoutt about?” I think for most people using these kinds of apps for the first few times, they start of as consumers of info/content and you later have to convert them to producers of content. Your value prop with “What do you want to shout about?”” here is all about the producer side, and I think that may not be as appealing for brand new users. Look at Twitter for example. Their landing page is all about the consumer value prop, and doesn’t mention the sharing aspect (“Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”)

5. A launch date and countdown would be awesome.

6. Get people to connect their FB accounts instead of just giving you their email. This way you could potentially send them FB notifications as well when you launch.

7. Try putting your messaging front and center instead of to the bottom left. We got great results with this.

8. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Anything I or anyone else here may tell you would just be intelligent guesses at what we think will work. You’ll get way better results from doing some quick A/B tests. We went from about 7% conversion to our landing page to about 55% conversion just by running a series of A/B tests.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#37

Post by mansigandhi »

spohlenz wrote: post #34
mansigandhi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow thanks! We made the change.

Not quite. You've added those to the body element (inline as well, which is a bad idea), whereas the background is on the #wrapper div. I'd suggest moving the background onto the body element, and adding the background-size definitions to the body element but within your CSS. With that fixed, it looks very nice indeed.

The pulses directly correspond to specific points on the map and we want the points to scale with the map on window resize. Making that change would require some more work from our end. We'll incorporate it later. Thanks though!

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#38

Post by [deleted] »

mansigandhi wrote: post #16
wilfra wrote: post #7

I think it's fucking gorgeous. On what could be improved: -Too much text in the lower left. You can use less characters and communicate the same thing better. Such as... -'Leave your email and we'll let you know when Shoutt arives' change to 'Request a beta invite' and change from 14px to 18-20px. Alternately, remove this text entirely and change button text from 'Submit' to 'Request Invite'. -Logo could use a bit mo…

Hi Wilfra. Awesome! Thanks for the feedback...really useful. We've changed the "Leave your email..." to "Request a beta invite". And we made the fonts slightly low-key. We'll look into the other changes for the layout and incorporate them.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#39

Post by spohlenz »

mansigandhi wrote: post #37
spohlenz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. You've added those to the body element (inline as well, which is a bad idea), whereas the background is on the #wrapper div. I'd suggest moving the background onto the body element, and adding the background-size definitions to the body element but within your CSS. With that fixed, it looks very nice indeed.

The pulses directly correspond to specific points on the map and we want the points to scale with the map on window resize. Making that change would require some more work from our end. We'll incorporate it later. Thanks though!

Ah. In that case I'd suggest extending the map downwards so that the background image is taller. My browser window is roughly 4:3 and the map cutoff detracts from what is a very nice design.

Re: Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

#40

Post by NaOH »

mansigandhi wrote: post #35
NaOH wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two minor tweaks. As long as "An app for you and your campus" is going to be split across two lines, change where the line break is. I'd suggest "An app [line break] for you and your campus." This brings greater emphasis to the idea of "you and your campus," plus it makes that line and everything which follows (beta invite, exclusively at Stanford, and what do you want) increasingly long (left to right), helping the…

Great point. We split it now to be An app for you. And your campus. Looks good?

Yes, I do think the revised line break looks good.

One other idea: I wonder if removing the periods after "campus," "invite" and "University" might look better. My thinking is two-fold: One, they seem to catch my eye a little. That's not a big deal, really, but I wonder if removing them will make the map points more attractive since they would then be the only period-like character on the page.

Maybe try it and see what you think. It may look off to you when implemented, maybe not. Obviously, this is just a stylistic suggestion, so go with whichever you think is more attractive.

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