
Ask HN: Feedback on my new web app please - pierrefar
http://cli.gs/
======
Brushfire
Please don't take this the wrong way -- but you need a designer to go over
your site. There are font inconsistencies, weird graphics, and the color
scheme doesnt work well in its current implementation. I've been guilty of
this as well, but your site would be better without any graphics (just
text/css) than with poor graphics.

Some other notes:

\- Less Is More. You dont need that much text on the homepage. It would be
much better to make it a simple 1. "X", 2. "Y", 3. "Z". Put all the answers to
the weird questions in a FAQ.

\- Easy to read means Easier to use. You have no need for a 100% width layout,
in fact it kind of makes it weird. This is just design opinion, see comment
about designer above. 100% can work if it is laid out correctly.

\- Thought of using email address as username? Makes logging in and signing up
a little easier.

\- Passwords. "Your password is valid and has been accepted but a bit weak.
You can make it stronger by adding characters like &, *, ! and others." Thats
fucking weird man. This isnt a site with secure information, in my opinion, so
the password is pretty trivial here. If you want stronger passwords, enforce
them, dont remind someone they are being stupid but do nothing about it.

\- AJAX / Javascript. Its not just to make things prettier (although that
would also be a benefit here). You can do live validation of fields and you
dont have to update the whole page if something goes wrong.

\- What the hell is the "Skip to navigation menu and content" Link at the very
top. Weird. Bad.

\- Dont you want to validate their email address before you let them post?

\- Make your home page after logging in a list of existing "cligs" with links
to create a new one. No need to make me click an extra time to view my
existing cligs. Think craigslist style if you need mental picture.

\- Your site doesnt validate. Thats bad. see
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcli.gs%2F>

\- You have a lot of CSS tags that read like "delicious-blogbadge-tall". Is
that yours? or stolen? Not accusing, but the naming conventions seems weird
for your site.

\- How do I close my account? These things need to be obvious, not explained.
\- How do I delete a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained.
\- How do I edit a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained.

The app itself seems to work pretty well, but the current state of the design
is totally nuts and will drive a lot of people away/. As such, most of my
comments are UI/Design related.

From a business/strategy standpoint, do not spend time re-creating the wheel.
Your competitors (including but not limited to is.gd or tinyurl) make using
their sites a lot easier. How can you expand upon their model making it
better/faster/easier/different? Different is best, as replication +
improvement only gets you so far. Right now your solution is not only
replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way. You need an
API. You need something that differentiates you.

Keep going! and hire a designer! Good luck.

:)

~~~
pierrefar
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely look into fixing the design given
your comments and the comments elswhere, perhaps using crowdspring as
suggested.

Not validating is not bad. It's not essential either. Take google.com for
example. And the delicious tags are not "stolen" but are the delicious.com
badge.

Closing accounts: didn't think of that, but easy enough to add.

Editing and deleting cligs is coming.

Skip to content link is for mobile users. A proper mobile-optimized layout is
coming that will be automatically used if a mobile UA is detected and this is
a temporary measure. As a mobile net user, I find such links very helpful.

But I think you're missing something important here. You say "Right now your
solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an
inferior way." Tinyurl and is.gd do not offer anywhere near the service Cligs
does in terms of analytics. I don't want to belittle them but they don't have
top contend with user accounts and layout out a ton of data in a sensible way.
So the current design of Cligs doesn't work but that's because it needs to do
a lot more.

Thanks again.

~~~
colinplamondon
Yeah, so your message is URL Shortener + Analytics.

Two nice rounded image headers, one for each, large ENTER URL HERE box, prompt
for registration on entering the URL. What's so complicated?

this is going to sound harsh, but looking at your site, I couldn't care less.
I go to a lot of sites, regularly share URLs with people, I'm your target
audience, and I'm not interested. It's overwought. It's not that your
frontpage needs to do a lot, it's that the page sucks.

If I visit, I want to submit a URL and then get analytics on the flipside.
Everything that isn't related to that task is extraneous.

Why not just nuke the entire page, put in a bigass textarea for copying in a
url, a submit button, and two small rounded image boxes describing,
respectively, URL Shortening and Analytics? You'd have a site that's
approximately 10 trillion and a half times better.

It's not that anyone's missing something, it's that your site fails to get
across why your site is useful.

------
felixc
The idea behind it is one that has an obvious demand, so good for you if you
find a way to make money off it.

However, there are a couple of things I don't like about the site design
itself:

\- The "skip to navigation menu and content" link at the top seems extraneous
to me -- I'm not sure of how it looks on lower resolutions, but I can already
see those parts of the page.

\- Using images for your titles. It's not just an accessibility problem, it's
lame. If you browse with a little zoom, compression artifacts are clearly
visible, and your "Register FREE" becomes "Register FR."

\- The gradient bars are -- to be blunt -- ugly.

Best of luck!

~~~
pierrefar
Thanks for the feedback. The skip link is for mobile users as I explained in
another comment.

The images and whole design will be looked into from scratch.

Thanks again!

~~~
maxklein
You're making a classic mistake. People are telling you problems, and instead
of trying to solve them, you're justifying the reasons. Classic fail.

------
hugh
Good idea (especially if you can persuade somebody to pay you).

Design suggestion: wording on the left hand side is too verbose. You should
think about how to get the idea across more quickly, maybe as a three-step
pseudo-cartoon.

On the downside, the stuff about SEO makes it sound like your site's primary
purpose is evil, and that's sad.

~~~
ggrot
Agreed with the evil bit. If you become popular, what is to stop every major
search engine to treat links from your site as a negative (spammy) signal?

------
callmeed
Interesting concept ... I like it. URL shortening is definitely something
early tech adopters use a lot (I'm not sure about the average Internet user).

You've definitely spelled out the benefits on the home page–but I'll be
totally honest: the website design is pretty bad. Simplify, get rid of that
laser beam and handwriting font, and clean up the page.

I think you could do some creative things to get traction ... for example,
create a FireFox plugin that cligs the current user's URL and posts it to
Twitter, Digg, or WordPress. Anything like that which makes it as easy as
possible for people to use the service will help adoption.

As for a business model, be creative as well.

~~~
pierrefar
Creativity is key as you say. I really like the plugin and extra features
ideas. I'll see what about implementing them in a sensible way.

Thanks!

------
jsmcgd
I like it. How about allowing people to use the service before signing up?
Obviously the data collected could be public.

~~~
pierrefar
I've debated this through-out the development process. Obviously the unique
feature here is the private analytics data, and making some cligs public might
confuse things.

It's something definitely on my mind but not sure how to deal with it.

~~~
mattmaroon
I would do it for sure. Most people probably wouldn't care about the links
traffic being public, but they will be turned off by a registration process.

~~~
jsmcgd
Agreed. How about making non sign up links only last a finite length of time?

~~~
mattmaroon
That would make me not use the service. If I'm short-linking on my blog or
Twitter account, I want to know that if someone clicks that link 2 years from
now, it will still function.

I actually would be curious to see how many people clicked it (and when) and I
usually wouldn't care if other people saw it as well.

------
bjclark
I couldn't past the design and immediately closed it. The color scheme is
truly awful.

------
sd
Just have one text field for the url you want to shorten. When the user clicks
submit, then give two urls. One is the shortened url, the other is for
analytics. Make the analytics url publicly accessible and have a button on
that page to make it private -- for a cost!

------
fbailey
it's brilliant for rickrolling and other nefarious activities finally I know
hom many I got.

But the site design is quite horribly, just remove every element you
specifically designed then it's going to be fine.

Remove: <http://cli.gs/images/home-page-message.jpg>
<http://cli.gs/images/cligs-logo-black.jpg> <http://cli.gs/images/home-page-
register.jpg>

But you could be succesful even if you don't remove those, design is not
really a success criterium online.

~~~
Brushfire
I disagree. A usable website matters. An Ugly interface matters. Certainly,
only to a point -- if shit is broken, it doesnt matter how pretty. Nice
interfaces lead to good brand equity which leads to trust which leads to use.

Brian

------
davidw
Nice, but I'm not sure how much "legs" it has in terms of being a _business_.

~~~
pierrefar
Thanks!

I have ideas about how to monetize it like adding premium features and adding
up-sell add-on services.

I subscribe to the launch early and launch fast mentality :)

~~~
ryanmahoski
A URL pointer service with tracking metrics - smart idea, good version 1. I
like that the metrics updated immediately after I clicked a link I'd made. The
interesting part to me was that it showed relevant Twitter, delicious, etc
traffic - for both the cli.gs link and the long URL. Signup was simple and
professional. Ignore the people who are expecting a perfect version - you made
it clear up front that you're not finished under the hood and haven't applied
polish yet. I see you're going to have charts and graphs eventually; nice. I
wonder, will you also pull client IP addresses through ip2geo to show maps of
visitor traffic? Lots of possible features to add. Congrats on v1 - keep
rolling out the reporting tools and polish. If you do, demand for your premium
plan should fall into place.

~~~
pierrefar
The country mapping is coming along with a lot of other analysis features.

It's V1 as you say and I wanted to get the ball rolling to get some data into
the database so I can start working off that - real data is better than
hypothetical data :)

------
samwise
i really like the idea. I like it so much that a few months back we launched a
similar product. Check out POPrl.com you can also view stats
(<http://poprl.com/stats/0Kb>) among other features. I would love to work
together if you're interested.

~~~
pierrefar
Interesting. Drop me a message at <http://blog.cli.gs/contact> and let's talk.

I love HN because of meetups like these!

~~~
jrockway
I like HN because you guys are trying to work together instead of slinging mud
at each other's projects ("but my version has foobar widgets!!11!").

(you guys)++

