
Virtualmin (a YC company) has a new website, feedback wanted - SwellJoe
http://www.virtualmin.com
======
staunch
Overall it's extremely nice. Some unfiltered random things that I thought:

\+ So much text on the front page I didn't read any of it.

\+ The favicon "fit into" the logo. Trivial, but pleasing.

\+ The first thing I wanted to see after screenshots was the demo, but I only
found that by scrolling to the bottom.

\+ The demo seems to be on a slow machine or something because it's not very
responsive and the UI graphics (rounded corner GIFs) loaded slowly (no
keepalives?).

\+ The quote "Your software kicks ass!" seems a _little_ risque for your
intended audience. It stood out to me at least.

\+ "Docs" navigation option made me thing of Google Docs & Spreadsheets which
through me off.

\+ Navigation links are a bit non-standard and seem unimportant because of
their size.

~~~
SwellJoe
I finally have to accept that pg was right...I talk way too damned much, and
everyone agrees. So the text is getting a serious pruning.

I'll make the demo more visible. The demo is, in fact, on a slow machine--it's
a qemu instance on the server itself. I'm moving it to a much faster xen or
EC2 this week sometime. It is now doing double duty as the Webmin demo server,
so at any given time there are several people logged in. It's working pretty
hard for such a wimpy system.

As for the quote being little risque, that's OK in my book. We're not the
stodgy choice (that'd be cPanel), so the stodgy "nobody ever got fired for
buying cPanel" folks won't buy what we're selling anyway. I think it's
downright wonderful that a customer said it on a whim, so I couldn't help but
take the opportunity to share it.

I've renamed Docs to Documentation.

I'll try bumping the nav links up a notch.

Thanks for the great tips staunch.

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pg
Clean look. Good fonts and colors. But way too much text. I'd guess you could
(thus should) cut three quarters of the words on the page. Also, it's not
clear enough that the screenshot is a screenshot: it looks like a form on the
page.

~~~
SwellJoe
I knew you'd say that (about the too much text). Everyone seems to agree,
though. Somehow I still manage to talk too damned much.

Text is being pruned as we speak. I'll see what I can do about the
screenshots.

~~~
vikram
I'm sure you are already doing this. But "The four best ways to manage your
server

Virtualmin offers four methods for managing your server: Web, mobile device,
command line, and remote API. Virtualmin is always available, no matter where
you are or how you want to work."

can be...

Virtualmin is always available, no matter where you are. You can conveniently
manage your servers through Web, mobile, command line and remote API.

I'd delete the entire paragraph following Try a live demo. Just replace it
with a link saying live demo.

With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with a
link and a play button on it here?

The little I know about writing I learned from "On writing well" - Zinsser.
His chapter on simplicity is worth the price of the entire book.

~~~
SwellJoe
"With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with
a link and a play button on it here?"

That's a great idea. Why didn't I think of that?

------
comatose_kid
A few thoughts:

\- too much text.

\- it isn't immediately obvious to me what the differentiators are for your
product vs. competition

\- Brighten up the site. Your audience may be technical, but that doesn't
necessarily mean we don't like colour. Of course, these things are subjective.

\- might want to make the screenshot even larger - or zoom into an interesting
feature. Visuals break up the page and draw the eye.

\+ the quote at the top is good

\- you say 'the four best ways to manage your server' and then make the user
search thru a paragraph of text to figure out what you mean. Call the 4 ways
out with more emphasis..

\- don't think you need the 'The New Virtualmin.com' section. It's like a
sausage maker boasting about improvements to their factory... Perhaps you
could make better use of that space by focusing on the product. \- Use more
visuals - perhaps to highlight the top 3 features of your product

There are more positives than I have mentioned but calling out what needs to
be improved would probably be of more use to you.

~~~
davidw
Hrm. I didn't like the quote at the top myself. I thought it focused too much
on the people making the thing, rather than something like "Thanks to
Virtualmin, I can manage 31415926 servers in just 10 minutes a day!" or "Here
at hornywetsluts dot com, virtualmin has been a blessing - it let us take our
business to the next level"... Something customer focused, in short.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'll point out the non-obvious fact that everyone is seeing a different quote,
every time they load the page. So, the quote you didn't like is probably not
the same one the parent did. ;-)

It's just nice things people have been telling us lately. The selection of
quotes will grow over time.

I should probably grill you two to find out exactly which quotes you did and
didn't like.

~~~
davidw
Aha, wasn't sure, should have quoted it. It was something to the effect of
"I'm sure you already know this, but you rock".

Not to comment at all on your degree of 'rocking', just that as a quote it
doesn't do too much for me:-)

------
dood
Basically I like it, but it could be more user-friendly, communicating what
you do with significantly less cognitive load.

Needs a tagline with the logo - tell me very quickly what it is you do. Could
even use the intro sentence "[Virtualmin is] the world's most powerful and
flexible webserver administration tool" as tagline.

You could then use the main textblock to make the the product's essential
features bolder and simpler to grok; less paragraphy, more bullet-pointy.

I would also minimise the bottom bits into link+sentence and make them
clearer/brighter. Sell the product in the main block: you don't need to sell
the links to the demo/video with whole paragraphs, just present them clearly.

Off the main page, you need some whitespace at the bottom of the landing pages
(buy & download). At the moment the footer is squashing the text.

~~~
SwellJoe
Thanks dood. Excellent advice.

Everyone, pg included, agrees that I talk too much. So I'll definitely cut out
some of the unnecessary exposition. Now that you mention it, it seems obvious
that I don't need to tell people why they would want to see the demo or the
introductory video. It really takes another pair of eyes to spot these kinds
of things (maybe design gods can do it all for themselves, but I never would
have figured it out for myself).

------
mynameishere
The screenshots need to NOT fly by. Put a link, "Next ScreenShot" at the top.
I call this the "Forbes Magazine slideshow problem", because forbes does that
to a ridiculous degree.

One thing: I've used products like this in the past, and really didn't like
them. Yours certainly looks nicer, but the big problem is that most admins
(most good admins) like to stay closer to the command line. So, a quick
suggestion: When someone envokes this or that command by clicking around,
stick it in a rolling log, clearly visible.

So, if I press "Start Tomcat", I see a little box that says:

/etc/init.d/tomcat5 start

...and if I press "Restart Machine" I see:

shutdown -9 now

...if you know what I'm saying. This will allow people to see precisely what's
going on, and let them ditch the admin screen as needed and replicate the
commands manually.

~~~
SwellJoe
Hey mynameishere,

Thanks for the suggestions. I was kind of worried about the screenshots,
myself. I'll add forward/back clickies.

Actually, we're pretty much with you on the "show people what's happening"
train, though we don't always show the command being executed (it's often not
actually commands, but processing of configuration files and such--restarting
services is a tiny part of what we do), we do generally show the command line
output of the commands we run. So, restarting a service does give you back the
results from the initscript.

And to go further on that theme, my book (published by No Starch in '03 and
now combined with Jamie's book from the Bruce Perens Open Source series and
online for free at <http://doxfer.com/Webmin)> is pretty heavily focused on
connecting up the GUI to the command line. We're not into hocus pocus and
hiding the system from the user--our interest is in making it easier to get
things done right fast.

I'll also mention that Virtualmin is based on Webmin, which is religious about
being polite to command line editing of configuration files. You can twist
your httpd.conf into a tiny little ball and toss it in a corner, and as long
as the syntax is valid, Webmin will deal with it correctly. It respects
comments, the order of the file, and won't overwrite your changes (except
where it has been told to do so). It is a wholly different kind of product
than Plesk or cPanel (which are pretty much all-or-nothing, and don't permit
anyone else to touch the config files). Webmin's got over 300,000 lines of
code to deal with all of that stuff correctly...nobody else even tries.

But, now I'm talking too much. ;-)

Thanks again for your thoughts.

~~~
brlewis
Another problem with the rotating screenshots...I clicked on the small version
to see it bigger and got a different screenshot.

~~~
SwellJoe
Is that a problem? I kinda thought the variety was interesting. But, if it's
disconcerting rather than exciting, I'll make it a bit more predictable. Shows
what I know. ;-)

Anybody else find randomized screenshots on the front page (and then not
matching the big version on the screenshots page) troublesome?

~~~
brlewis
Problem was when I saw a screenshot with details that interested me, I clicked
on it hoping to get a larger version. I did get a larger version, but it was a
larger version of a _different_ screenshot.

------
kingnothing
Not to kick a dead horse, but I agree with everyone that there's too much
text. It isn't just a problem on the front page, but all across the site.

On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?

~~~
SwellJoe
"On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?"

That's actually the same note. If you had the question when looking at the
website, others will too. ;-)

I'm working on a new comparison chart (the old one was too wordy) to post to
the website sometime soon.

Short answer:

We're mobile capable. Nearly everything in the browser UI degrades to a usable
mobile accessible version

We're clean and polite to the underlying system. Sysadmins who've dealt with
cPanel or Plesk on the command line will know how valuable this distinction
is.

Comprehensive and easily scriptable command line and remote API.

Ruby on Rails and Gems support in the next release this weekend

PHP 4 and PHP 5 simultaneously with php.ini and PEAR modules management

mod_fcgid with suexec (rather than the old and rather clunky suphp)

spam/AV filtering per-user and per-domain

built-in WYSIWYG website builder

nice database GUIs for MySQL and PostgreSQL (I believe they are nicer than
phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin, but if the user disagrees we also provide those)

70+ easily installable applications (compare to Fantastico at $199 extra),
including SugarCRM and a few others that nobody else has the guts to touch
because they're so damned complicated to install

comprehensive monitoring and alerts (also mobile capable)

optional Google Analytics (and Quantcast and MyBlogLog) injection into all
pages, regardless of how they're served--static, PHP, Ruby, CGI, whatever

tiered pricing, so someone with a couple of domains doesn't have to spend $450

There's more, but I'm talking too much again...

------
chris_l
Just a small point, but on Firefox on Linux the "Lost Password / Register "
links don't render properly (unless you make the font really small). Makes the
page look a bit messy.

~~~
SwellJoe
Yeah, I noticed that, too. That was due to some other suggested changes.
Should be fixed now in the style sheet.

~~~
chris_l
Nope, still there for me :( Although it's broken in a different way now...

~~~
SwellJoe
I see. If you've forced bigger fonts it pushes things around some. I'll have
to work on that. A white-space: nowrap for that div makes the login form
unbreakable, but it can break the rest of the page with fonts even two notches
bigger than what I've specified. That's a problem (I force bigger fonts
myself, quite often...).

Thanks for pointing it out.

------
tx
Very cool! I did not get one part: are you the same team who makes webmin?

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes. Jamie, my co-founder is the primary author of all 300,000+ lines of code
in Webmin and the 90,000+ lines of code in Usermin. (I'm not entirely
convinced he's human.)

~~~
tx
Kudos to your cyber-cofounder :)

------
fireandfury
The question I was thinking was: Who exactly is this product for?

