Ask HN: What's wrong with my launch page?

The page layout is kind of all over the place. Simplify it.

1. Put everything into on column.

2. Get rid of the poll ... all it's going to do right now is distract from your primary objective of capturing email addresses.

3. Make the text bigger.

4. Make your company logo bigger with a stronger stroke weight on the company name.

5. Make the social links smaller. They're fighting for attention with your site logo.

6. Consider structuring your page as follows (top to bottom):

[Logo]

[Short text describing what you're going to do for your potential users]

[Input field for an email address and submit button]

[Social links for Facebook and Twitter]

I'd run an A/B test to see whether the Facebook/Twitter is a distraction and remove that if you find it takes away from your conversion rate.

You could also A/B test the text you include describing your service till it converts well.

Looks like a scam website to me.

1)Consider another font

2)It's too dense on information: separate it

3)Your modal is terrible(had no content and titled 'Imaged Viewer')

I'd consider taking a Bootstrap template and work on top of it

https://www.freshdesignweb.com/free-bootstrap-templates.html

http://startbootstrap.com/

I assume you are trying to convince people to use what you built?

tl;dr _The easiest way to do that is by explaining what's in it for your user, up front, and in the clearest terms possible._

For years I used to make the mistake of thinking that I should describe the features of my projects and let the the user decide if it solved their problem.

Let me show you an example. A friend of mine runs gitwatcher.com

Three major areas of prime real estate used to describe features, a little similar to your landing page.

The reason that features don’t make for good geek marketing is 2-fold:

1) People are lazy. Especially geeks. Almost nobody reads anything but the headers from your website.

2) If someone needs to decide whether or not they are interested in a feature, they need to think about all problems they are facing right now and see if the feature would apply to any one of them (e.g. do I really need to categorize by tagging and watch and compare right now?).

It’s a mental for-each loop. O(N). Most people are lazy. So they won’t.

Instead, talk about the problems that your side projects solve. Make it exceedingly easy for people to know what’s in it for them.

For example, if you look at shareasimage.com you will see their headline isn’t utilitarian like “we create images with text in them for you.”

It’s a solution-oriented pitch about the direct value you get for using your their product: "The fastest way to double your social engagement."

Notice also the clear call-to-action. There is only ONE place that it is clear you should click.

To use the gitwatcher.com example, instead of selling features like “Categorizing by tagging,” you might try more solution-oriented sentences like:

“The easiest way to keep up with the coolest new open-source projects?”

“Want to get a free weekly email digest with the GitHub projects you should be keeping an eye on?”

Skip the for-each loops and let your readers do a O(1) mental operation. If you tell them the problems you solve, they can instantly know YES or NO. No mental processing necessary

I can't tell there's even an email field, that could be one thing. It's really hard to see.

However, you may just be seeing the natural result of very, VERY few people having the ability to relate to what you're doing. That's not bad - it's niche but a big important niche - but you can't expect to convert at high numbers from the general population for such a niche. Good luck!