

Ask HN: What do you think of our redesigned website? - nkohari
http://agilezen.com/?r=hn

======
staunch
The screenshots on the front seem poor to me. They're very light and empty --
not exciting at all. Four seems like too many. I didn't even realize you could
click them at first, maybe add a magnifying glass in the corner?

No obviously call to action on the front page. I didn't feel like there was an
obvious next page to click on to.

Overall nice, but being honest: a bit generic/standard/derivative.

~~~
nkohari
Re: call-to-action, it's between the signup button and the video tour. I might
try to make the video tour link stand out a bit more, though.

The product itself is (intentionally) sparse and understated. This leads to
(we think) a great user experience, but doesn't result in very good
screenshots. :) We also didn't really want to overwhelm the user with a
complex display of features, because our value proposition is being simpler
and easier to use than our competition.

Good points, though.

------
DanielStraight
A suggestion on the video tour: Put the "start here" video on the tour page
itself. In typical user fasion, by the time I got to the page I forgot why I
was there, so it didn't even occur to me to look for a video until I went back
and remembered I clicked video tour. Then I went back to the video tour page
and wondered why there was no video on it.

~~~
nkohari
Yeah, I'm on the fence about the tour start page, with the four summaries
(<http://agilezen.com/tour>). I might just ditch it and funnel users directly
into the first step of the tour. The summaries don't add enough to risk
bouncing people before they get to the videos.

~~~
DanielStraight
Or even just show a typical video link with screenshot from video and play
button in the middle.

------
sunkencity
Looks good, but move your javascripts out of the head and place them last
before </html> that way you can avoid the page stalling and being white before
showing content, it's a bit laggy now and flashes white for half a sec or so.
When firefox (and some other browsers too, I think) encounter javascript they
stop rendering until they have parsed the javascript.

~~~
nkohari
It's funny, I knew that, and then somehow I still put it in the header. :)
Thanks.

------
nkohari
When we originally launched our public-facing website for Zen in May, the
product was still under heavy development, and we had very few screenshots.
Now that the product has stabilized, we've redesigned our marketing site to
try to showcase the product a little better.

Any feedback is most welcome!

------
AhtiK
Good overall look. But IMHO 4 screenshots at the front-page do not provide
enough detail. It took more than a minute to figure out that those 4
thumbnails are meant to be clicked.

I think I also liked the site design that was up ~1mo ago. Plus the product
itself is also very nice.

~~~
nkohari
Thanks. I might try to funnel visitors towards the video tour more, since
that's where the product is really showcased. The screenshots are just meant
to grab your attention. :)

------
lrm242
I think it looks good. The only thing that jumped out at me was how much
vertical space you're giving up for the logo and banzai tree. This is pushing
valuable information down below the fold. Also, on the home page you might
consider pulling your signup button up above the fold.

~~~
nkohari
Good point. I typically don't believe in the fold, but we are using up a lot
of content area for the "splash" artifacts.

------
datawalke
Looking good. It is nice and clean. However I would really like to see
something to describe the four screenshots. Maybe underneath them a little
black box that spans across the width of the 4 images that has a little arrow
overlapping right on the bottom of each screenshot describing what it does.

~~~
nkohari
Good idea. Captions would help. I might also see if there's a way I can direct
users to the associated part of the video tour from the screenshots.

------
workhorse
That is a great design, very nice work.

------
jaymedavis
Looks awesome, really clean and simple.

------
GiraffeNecktie
The free pricing plan seems too restrictive. If I'm going to evaluate it's
usefulness for a team, I'll need to get buy-in from at least one other person
and see how it works when several people are contributing.

~~~
nkohari
Yeah, it's tough to find a balance with freemium pricing. The restrictive free
account is one of the reasons we introduced the 30-day money-back guarantee.
It's actually baked into the software, so if you cancel your account (or
downgrade to the free plan) in the first 30 days, it automatically refunds
your money.

We have considered adding one collaborator to the free plan. We've taken the
stance of starting with it very restrictive and then sizing it up if
necessary, because it's much harder to go the other way and take things away
from users. :)

------
amackera
I don't know what it looked like before, but this looks good!

------
shafqat
Looks great. But the big green pricing/plans button was below the fold for me!
Can you move it higher?

