Ask HN: Review my startup (vivapixel.com)

I read HN every day and would love feedback from the community on vivapixel.com. Vivapixel is a new photo sharing site that provides users a safe and fast place to upload, edit and share photos. We have been working on the service for about 3 months and we're looking for feedback/comments/ideas.

Some of the features: -Albums can be public or private. -Albums can be shared (allow friend/family to upload photos with a password) -You can upload photos to your albums via email, each album can have it's own @vivapixel.com email address (this is great for allowing friends and family to email photos to your albums, it's also great for camera-enabled phones like the iPhone or blackberry) -Site is optimized for speed and ease of use (tring to make the site mom-friendly) -You can upload videos and share videos.(250mb limit right now) -Supports: comments, tags, html embedding codes, exif information etc.

Anyone can create a free user account. Thanks and we appreciate any feedback from the HN community.

So here are my thoughts:

1) You give me no reason to use you rather than Flickr or Facebook. What is the reason YOUR site is better? I'm not saying it isn't, but that needs to be on your frontpage. You have to assume your customer is going to have photos online elsewhere.

2) Frontpage signup button took me to an Oops page, so I can't even register to try the service. Looks like it goes to signup.php rather than /signup

3) A pet peeve. If you're going to allow me to login without authorizing my account, just log me in after I register. Why make me re-authorize myself.

4) Creating an album before upload is an extra step. Allow me to create the album in the upload process, sure require it, but I want to begin uploading images right away.

After playing with the site some, I still don't have an understanding what makes your site a killer site in the crowded market. What is it that makes you better than Flickr, Facebook or Myspace for my photos?

Working on the transfer function now, hope to be done ASAP.

Facebook connect, hmmm will look into this...

thanks for the comments

Your logo's border looks particularly thick. It doesn't look very good on such a minimalist site.

"Vivapixel helps you store and share your photos and videos !"

There shouldn't be a space before the exclamation point. Furthermore, there shouldn't be an exclamation point at all. You're not making us excited right now, you're selling your product. It looks better if you're confident enough to stick to a period.

The checkboxes look very generic. Why not use a font-specific checkbox, if you need checks at all?

Bold fonts to me suggest slovenliness. Any reason you can't use a normal font thickness, and experiment with sizes to emphasize?

Work on the quality of your writing. If you've got three bullet points, it helps if they're about equal in length. "Crystal clear photos & videos" is overlong and doesn't say anything: aren't all photos crystal clear online? Does crystal clear video mean HD? (I'd also tell you to hyphenate crystal-clear, but it would be better to go with another phrase entirely.) "Safe and Fast" should see the f in "Fast" lowercased. Furthermore, these aren't points you should be making. I don't think of photo sites as unsafe or slow. You bringing these up makes me wonder just how fast and safe you are. (It's like the proverbial restaurant that advertises "Our meat doesn't come from cats.")

I notice all the photos up front were taken by Dave. Any chance of getting other photographers/some spoof accounts to look better? Also, for the love of Pete remove the border from that photo. Nothing adds to slightly disorienting clutter than vaguely noticeable borders around things that should remain borderless.

The "create new account" button isn't clickable. Make it so I can click that button.

Don't give us a tour using thumbnails on the front page. That's cluttered. If you had more going on, thumbnails would be fine, but as it is it looks pretty cluttered. Also, work on the spacing. If you've got to have thumbnails, give them some space. Don't jam text up against the photo. Again, work on spacing (between commas in the second thumbnail) and punctuation (the first thumbnail has a sentence that doesn't end in a period) and capitalization (a lot of offenders here).

There are a few other things - the spacing of the top links, the links in the footer - but those are minor compared to your main problem, which is that this splash page doesn't make me want to sign up. I don't see the advantage, beyond having a cool web site URL, to using this above Flickr.

Remember that a good design means convincing people they want to use you. Right now, that's not happening, and that's a problem.

I don't have an answer for you, my point was that the majority of users who will find your service will have their photos elsewhere already and it requires something to make them move.

Photos are a saturated market. I don't have any killer features to suggest, and I don't mean to make it sound like you're dead in the water - far from it. You're a young startup with a fairly solid site from the looks of it, it just didn't show me anything which would entice me to move photos to your site.

As for your feedback on Flickr, you and I may feel that way, but the millions of users they have are in love with the service. Swaying someone who loves a product is like trying to convince someone to switch religions, it's nigh impossible.

I'll look forward to seeing how your site shapes up over time.