

Ask HN: Why the splashpage trend? - markkat

It seems a trend that every new service has a colorful billboard page with a big sign up button. Personally, I'm usually not in the mood for a product tour, I want to poke around before I sign up.<p>I'm curious, am I in the minority? Why the trend?
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ambiate
After serious amounts of A/B testing, this was the generalized result. A
result that is comforting to an user. A result that makes an user agree to
decide this is the service they want to try, and be sent to a page with
payment options. Resulting in a higher conversion ratio, because the user
already has the mindset they wanted to try this service.

Personally, the almost flash looking website portals are really annoying to
me. My non geek friend eats them up.

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markkat
Ah, A/B. I have to wonder if the efficiency can be generalized as much as it
seems to be in use.

Are the silly cartoon creatures part of A/B too? :P I do hope this runs its
course.

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ambiate
When I first saw the cartoon characters, they were used to display meta
information about sites. Overviews, brief tutorials, etc. Now, its just
somewhat morphed into the norm. Just imagine if you're a programmer with no
design ideals! You look around at other startups and see this antialiased
design with bright colors and characters all over the screen and jquery
mayhem. You look at the successful sites and the failures and see a theme in
both. Its a bandwagon. Shrug. I know I was in this situation. I wanted to
design a site and saw minimalism, bright colors and huge cartoons everywhere.
I adapted with much restraint.

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markkat
>Shrug. I know I was in this situation. I wanted to design a site and saw
minimalism, bright colors and huge cartoons everywhere. I adapted with much
restraint.

:D I have to admit, I had to resist the same influences.

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taitems
Conversely, some times I have zero interest in reading a companies blog, or
what awards they won from PC Magazine back in 1999. You make it sound like a
lot of these websites even have more to offer? Sometimes a product is just a
product. A download link and a screenshot.

