

We're trying out a splash page. - petervidani
http://www.phome.us

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petervidani
I run a homepage manager with my friend and we look at 2 very concrete
statistics: signups and clicks (on the homepages). We wanted to see if we
could increase our adoption rate, so we revamped our splash page.

We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with
you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash
pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of
the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract
a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?

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timcederman
Did anyone else feel slightly nauseous from the wavy boxes around the normally
aligned text? Or is it just me? :)

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shafqat
I spent about 15-20 seconds looking at the page, and had no idea what this
service does. You need to make it more obvious, even for not-so-smart users
like me.

But I like the design.

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gm
One more vote for the confused user... I had to read the "Get to the sites you
always visit, and see when they are updated" several times to even guess what
your site does.

Are you talking about a bookmark repository (ok, "homepage") that somehow
tells you when there is new stuff on your bookmark?

If that is the case, shouldn't you put a sample image on this screen that
shows how the homepage looks like, including the one that tells you a site has
been updated?

Ok, but your questions was about a splash screen :-) ... It looks good, but
don;t call it a splashscreen. The word brings up awful memories of sites that
forced you to wait a minute or two over dial-up just to display some image
that told you nothing except to click to get to where you really wanted to go.
Your screen has a lot more than that, it is actually useful.

As far as homepages that look very different than the rest of the site, this
is a good thing. Lots of entertainment-related sites use them, and they are
overall a good thing. The homepage engages the visitor, makes a good
impression, and the rest of the site is actually the useful part. Yours is
pretty good, it's just the wording I had an issue with.

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jacobbijani
Interesting. We thought it was very self-explanatory, but maybe we have just
been too immersed in it. It's a homepage (in the sense of your browser's
starting page) which holds links to the sites you always visit.

It auto discovers the RSS feed and periodically checks them, but we never
refer to it as "RSS feeds" on the site. We tried to abstract that process as
much as possible, so it becomes like any other toggle button.

That's exactly what we were going for, to hook them and pull them to step two
(which will hopefully pull them to step three, and so on). Now that we have
the format, we plan on continuing to tweak the copy until we find something
that works.

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natch
"and I totes love it."

Huh? Totes? What? I guess I'm just not cool enough for this site.

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gm
Yeah, that got a chuckle out of me too... But a quote is a quote :) Better to
leave it exactly as said.

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truebosko
Your tagline on top doesn't make sense to me, I don't get what the product
does and it just confused me a bit more, apart from that confusion the design
looks fabulous

Also love the Totes quote .. what the?

