

Inbound.org: Community-curated Marketing News - InfinityX0
http://inbound.org/

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SeoxyS
This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the shallow approach to design.
Sure, it looks nice, but it functions awfully.

Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on
any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really
well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly
functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited
links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines.
Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.

Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well
designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that
just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10
headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than
HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information
like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a
homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.

This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building
a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an
understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny
things by following photoshop tutorials.

~~~
kaiuhl
That's pretty hypercritical. Personally, I'd like HN to have more reasonable
typography like a fixed width column for comments—somewhere in between Inbound
and HN as it exists currently.

It's also not functionally awful. My wife, an interior designer, has often
commented that she doesn't know how I can stand to read comments from this
site because of how garish the colors and how poor the type is. We've had time
to adapt to the use of HN because the content is great and the software has
been evolved to function well.

Inbound also has an entirely different target market, one that is, by
definition, more superficial and shallow in regard to design. Nothing that
looked like HN would get traction in the marketing community, at least from
the people I know.

~~~
dshah
@randfish and I were very inspired by HN. We understand the tradeoffs in terms
of design (we're big reddit fans too).

Your observation that marketers (our audience) are different from hackers is
dead-on.

With inbound.org we had some early debate around design. Candidly, I was more
on the "lets make it like HN" (I write code every day) and he was more on the
"lets do something creative and solve for our audience" (he has a much better
aesthetic sense). We're still debating it.

We're also both entrepreneurs, so understand the importance of launching and
just getting it out there.

Now, back to dealing with the technical issues we've run into tonight...

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guywithabike
Why did they schedule maintenance for the middle of the day on which they
launch? That seems like the _worst_ time to take down your site for scheduled
maintenance.

Doesn't take a marketer to know that.

~~~
scoot
Because it wasn't scheduled.

~~~
dshah
You're right. It's not scheduled maintenance. We're furiously working on the
issue as we speak.

~~~
clone1018
If you need some servers just let me know man.

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gabaix
inbound.org is a reference to Inbound Marketing, which Hubspot coined
entirely.

HubSpot snapped the term "Inbound Marketing" (which really means "permission
marketing") so they could differentiate more easily from other marketing
software competitors.

The strategy is really smart. If you look for "inbound marketing" on Google,
Hubspot has completely pushed down the older term by flooding the page with
results they more or less created: conferences, groups, books, even a
Wikipedia page defined by the company.

For old time marketers, "Inbound Marketing" meant "marketing research", as
opposed to "Outbound Marketing" which meant "reaching out to users".

In a sense, it shows those guys are great at what they are doing, marketing.

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lrobb
I'd like to register, but twitter only???

And then... An error occurred while trying to retrieve your Twitter username.
Please try again.

~~~
mwilcox
It's run by marketers, after all.

~~~
getsat
And HN is written/run by a developer who made his fortune building web apps,
yet it still manages to average a 5+ second page load time. What's your point?

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phamilton
Not to troll, but I think a segregation of the crowd here would be great. I
know pg has made a few comments lately along the lines of "where did all these
non-hackers come from?"

I feel like sub-HN's would be helpful, as I find myself generally reading
programming tips and things much more than I read "how to get your conversions
up".

Having a good community to submit that to and discuss would cut down on the
signal to noise ratio for readers like me.

~~~
cobychapple
Wouldn't sub-hacker-news threads for non-hackers defeat the purpose of it
being part of __hacker __news in the first place?

~~~
phamilton
I agree. That's why I hope inbound takes off.

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SquareWheel
Do I really need to use Twitter to sign up? I feel like I must be missing the
real button and it's just hidden somewhere.

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cobychapple
Prediction: tomorrow we'll see the front page full of "Hacker News for XYZ".

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shaka881
This is wonderful. I love it. Lots of SEO and Social Media Marketing articles.
I hope they poach a lot of people from HN.

_(ssh, quiet...!)_

~~~
chrisguitarguy
The smart ones (including Rand) will stay here, sit quietly, listen/read, and
say very little.

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WadeF
I love this concept, but I'm hoping they can manage to get a community that
can keep the level of content high instead of the mostly link bait and spam
articles the SEO community is known for.

A quick look at the home page for Inbound.org which has 25 articles shows: * 9
articles that are "X Number of Things" * 4 "The Guide to" articles * 2 "How
to" articles

That's 15 out of 25 articles that are mostly filled with shallow link bait
type articles. Granted I didn't read all of them so I'm sure some are good and
deserve to be high on the page but the ratio is way off.

By comparison the HN home page has zero of the same type of articles.

Now maybe that's what they are going for, but personally I'd love to see less
lists and more high quality content around marketing.

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petewailes
My only problem with this is that I can't see how this isn't going to be
hugely insular, and spammed to death by self-promoting "marketers".

I'm curious how it's going to avoid turning in to what Sphinn at the worst
times.

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shaka881
So many of the linked articles have comment threads that are total circle
jerks!

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paolomaffei
Very good! Two questions

1) How did you build this? Some pre-made system or not?

2) Is there a list of more specific communities like this? Examples:
entrepreneurship only, selling only, consulting only.

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kmfrk
You have way too many articles on the front page. It feels a little ridiculous
that I have to scroll down on a 24" monitor at 1920x1080 to read everything.

It's a little similar to what I said about another side:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547100>.

I might accept a lot of articles in one page, but I should be able to view
everything in one "page" regardless.

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aresant
Love the concept and I'm hopeful that it gets the traction deserved.

A couple of UI comments from a brain that spends all day on conversion / UI:

a) HN at 1280x1024 gives you nearly 30 items without scrolling vs. ~10 on
Inbound which feels like a UI problem.

b) The header is unnecessarily large, the "Hot Articles" title is redundant to
the point of the site. In conversion testing I've never seen a larger header
improve sticky/conversion and less is always more.

c) On hover you activate the color change of the story table but I still have
to navigate to the actual link for the click through which is non-intuitive.

d) Categorizing is an interesting idea but I think that appeal of HN and many
specific community sites (or subreddits for that matter) is that sub-
categorizations aren't necessary. EG the community picks the content that's
interesting to the community, and category sorting is a "power user" desire,
but just confuses the 95%.

Big fan of the work you guys do elsewhere, hope this sticks!

~~~
dshah
Thanks for the feedback. You make some really good points.

a) You're right. Though we're not going to get to the same density as HN
(we've deliberately chosen to show more information per article), we should be
able to get more items in there.

b) You're right. It's too large.

c) Right again. We should allow clicking through the article on any area that
triggers the hover.

d) This was a deliberate choice. We debated it, and categories won out. Though
the right thing to do is to test it (and see what down-side impact the
categories are having -- and whether that's worth the additional
categorization).

For now, we're working on getting the site back up. The issue is not traffic
(directly), but some strange wonkiness with the twitter oauth process.

~~~
powertower
You should also take a look at the site using IE8 (one of the largest browser
segments for general traffic). The articles area is grey-ed out (you can
hardly see it).

------
iseff
I've been a part of the beta of inbound.org, and have been really impressed
with the community thus far.

It's still very immature and small, but it brings together some of the
brightest minds in inbound marketing.

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) deserve a lot of gratitude
for getting this community started.

~~~
dshah
As fans of HN, one thing we know is that what makes the whole thing work is
the community. So, thank _you_.

We're hoping to make the same kind of magic for marketers that HN has been
able to do for hackers.

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dohertyjf
I've also been a part of the beta testing and think it will be a great tool. I
love HN for the technical and startup material and have found some amazing
material here. I hope Inbound.org is the start of other awesome crowdsourced
communities in the HN-style model.

Hats off to Rand and Dharmesh.

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thefahim
Design suggestion: I am more interested in seeing the score given by the
community rather than the rank awarded by an algorithm. I think you should
replace the large position text (#1, #2, etc) and with the # of upvotes.

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j_col
No disrespect intended, but did you load test this app before launching it?

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paraschopra
Great initiative. This has been lacking in marketing industry. Although as
others have pointed, I think UI could be polished a bit. It doesn't yet feel
as fluid as HN.

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hengli
Maybe something like this? Just a few minutes in developer tools.

<http://cl.ly/1p1C0t0E3A0H400L293J>

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whichdan
Really looking forward to checking this out once it's back online - a
marketing site with a community even half as strong as HNs would be absolutely
great.

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Alex3917
Neither the login or register features are working. I'm trying to create an
account but just getting a blank dialog box.

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staunch
This is going to work (if you can make the site work!) I'll definitely
participate.

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joedev
What are so many inbound marketers doing hanging out on HN?

~~~
klbarry
Customer acquisition is one of the most important features of start-ups.

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ABS
love the idea, really looking forward to it but... did you ask a marketer to
decide what platform to built on? wordpress? really?? :-p

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badclient
Who is this targeted at?

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slater
Looks like the SEO D-Bags have already discovered your site :(

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klbarry
I am extremely excited for this. I have been wanting something like this for
some time.

