yes, mostly lame. The owl is cute. Why would someone sign up if they have no idea what you are doing or offering? What kind of person do you think would sign up? Is that kind of person your business target? Slowly spoon-feeding info to the reader with animation is disrespectful. If you have something to say, put it out there so it can be read as quickly as the reader is able, or at least clicked through. Under the logo you have text in four different colors and weights. If everything is a different style, how do you know what to focus on? Is grab an invite a link?
Compress. How about" Enter your email to get an invite" Do people really need a green example of what an email address is? the animated text is amusing, are you going to be a comedy site?
I question the premise of this splash page. If anything, you should post a blog with some of the posts from your personal page about the process of putting together the site and go from there. I just don't get the "I am doing something so secret I can't tell you, but give me your email" concept. Go for the blog of your progress, at least that has something. Best of luck on the project.
I appreciate the candid feedback. I'm not going to say, "I know," although a lot of what you've been saying was bothering me as I put it together.
Re: collecting email - that's not actually the goal. However, I'm collecting WAY more than I would if I put the logo and a general tag-line.
The goal was to just let people have some experience with the brand. Be it amusing or fun. I was hoping to garner a smile. I actually didn't think it would be considered disrespectful, and I question whether you'd feel the same if you stumbled upon it via my Twitter, etc.
Nevertheless, I really do appreciate the time you took to write up your thoughts and appreciate your well wishes.
Ditch the animation and present the teaser clearly in a way people can control their consumption of. Most users want to quickly skim over new pages to determine if it interests them.
With your animation I spent 20 seconds staring and still have no idea what your product is even related to. Leaving me frustrated and completely uninterested.
Looks nice, but I don't like having to wait through the description text. Also, there really isn't much of a description of what it is or what it does. Without knowing anything about it I wouldn't give my e-mail address to you. The link to the Facebook page doesn't work yet so I would take it off until it is functioning.
thanks for the feedback. fixed the FB link to my fan-filled page.
Re: the length, I realize it's a tease.
Re: trusting us with your email. I get where you're coming from. If I put a static page I knew I had little to no chance. I've got a few people and I'd assume it's because the conversation intrigued them. I haven't reached out so, I guess I'm in the "better than nothing" ship.
Very nice, I like that you opted for HTML5 instead of Flash. However I've no idea what you do or are trying to offer so why would I sign up for an invite? For all I know it may be an invite to spam.
Yes, that's the dilemma. I didn't want to have a blank page, but I'm not ready to chat about it -- well, unless you are liquid and want to share some wealth! Thanks for the feedback.
Yes. I see where you were going but having watched the full animation I still don't know what you are teasing. I glanced away right as the text said something about social network-something-something.
Get to the point.
If this wasn't a request for feedback I would have bailed almost instantly.
solution. Keep the 'fun' speech bubble on the right but put another on the right with the <140 character tease text.
Appreciate the honest remarks. Problem with my HN post is that I thought my comment (below) was the description for the link :) Probably gives you a better idea of where I was coming from. Quite a noob I am!
I guess it was loading slow for me, so all there was a grayed bird and email box. I waited and waited, than the animation started. I was about to leave.
Then, the text was fast (for me, at least) and I was totally distracted by the animation and missed lots of text in the beginning.
Now I'm under the impression that it's social network site for pets, and I guess I misread it, but won't refresh to find out :)
A little usability feedback - the large email box can be a good thing, what we call a good Fitt's Law object.
Placing text inside of input fields lowers the response rate, and creates issues when the user looks to see if they entered the correct type of input, yet the instructional label has been replaced by their own text.
Thanks for the tips. Always nice when you have two contradictory statements in the same thread. Because your feedback requires me to do no work, you're definitely my hero.
Cute mascot. I initially didn't see the text because I opened the page in a new tab, so I would definitely make something a little more static unless it's triggered by a user action. (Even then, try to provide a bit more incentive to sign up.)
I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth! The hope was people would enjoy the experience enough to "trust" us with the email and a follow-up down the road.
I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth!
You should be working on your product instead of futzing around with a placeholder web site that you don't actually intend anyone to see.
If you actually want to gauge customer interest and collect e-mails, then put some content on that page and worry about the presentation (and I actually think that's a really good idea). As things stand, if you won't give any real info on the page then you're just dicking around, and it won't make a bit of difference to your business whether you put up the site you have now, a text only "Under Construction" page, or a trollface with a hand drawn penis chewing on its ear. Even any e-mails that you do collect are essentially worthless because they're not targeted at all to your product, so any signups just indicate that some people will inexplicably sign up for anything at all...
Agree with your sentiment which is why I only allowed an afternoon to put it together and out. My reason for posting was, honestly to see if people actually felt it reflected so poorly that I should replace it with the standard hand-drawn peni chewing on ear.
Re: focusing on the actual product. This was the first "hello world" deployed with the dev-environment setup. SCM, scripts, and all that BS that's annoying to setup after you haven't done it in years was where the majority of the time was spent. I'm pretty sad how long it took me to setup everything.
Re: random emails, great point. The majority of the people who sign up are people I speak to directly or are in my network.
You may be interested to know that today I've only had about 36 non-garbage looking sign-ups and seems like around ~630 page views. So about 5% of views today resulted in a sign up.
I created http://duringconstruction.com/ for reasons such as this. Naturally it has to be a little more generic but you can get it up by only changing DNS. It gives you all of the benefits while wasting as little time as possible.
I think the page you put up has personality but there really wasn't anything to hook me into giving up my email address. I think being completely stealthy and getting lots of email addresses and/or is impossible or at least very difficult unless you have a high profile personality involved. Without that I need something to pique my curiousity.
Cool idea. I checked it out and thought it was a nice site.
Yeah, I'm not really going for emails, just thought it was funny to have a talking owl try to coax someone to sign up for something they had no clue about. I think I may enjoy it more than anyone.
Thanks for the help and I'll make sure to pass your link along next time I see someone considering building an "under-construction" page.
Hi HN. I'm working on a new project, but wanted to have a splash page to send people. I wanted it to be a bit different -- hopefully more engaging. The other key limit was I refused to spend more than an afternoon putting it together and getting it live as I never expected too many folks to randomly stumble and go to it.
Feedback, suggestions, slander are all welcome. I realize folks have strong opinions. Happy Sunday.
