

Ask HN: Review my startup (vivapixel.com)  - dhpmx

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.<p>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.<p>Anyone can create a free user account. Thanks and we appreciate any feedback from the HN community.
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trickjarrett
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?

~~~
dhpmx
Flickr is a good service, don't get me wrong, but I'm not a big fan for big
brother or someone trying to stuff ads down my throat all the time (just my
2cents)

Facebook, don't keep the originals, only the cropped versions of the photos...
also what about the millions of folks who don't have a facebook account ?

Frontpage button: Sorry. fixed it !

I never claimed my site to be "killer", it's new and will get better over
time... It's by having users who use the site and want a better experience
that the site will evolve.

What would make the site "killer" in your opinion ?

thanks for the comments.

~~~
trickjarrett
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.

------
unalone
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.

~~~
dhpmx
Thanks for the comments, spend so much time on the code that we sometimes
forget the look and feel (as well as punctuation)

------
thepanister
It looks interesting... But can you please make a demo video, or make a demo
version that would allow us to make a fast test without requiring creating an
account?

EDIT: Also consider providing users a way to transfer their photos from their
current service to yours, and to share the photos through multiple
platforms... such as facebook.

Also consider letting users to login using their facebook account - Facebook
connect.

Also if you require users to sign up, then consider making a small
registeration form at the front page, to accelerate the signup process, and
make users feel it's easy to do.

EDIT: If you are interested in learning about the user's experience, then
consider adding a feedback form, that's easy to be filled.

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

Facebook connect, hmmm will look into this...

thanks for the comments

