You say, "When I first hit your homepage I'm confronted with a big image and a sign-up, aka fail".
I'm curious to know why a sign up on the main page is a bad, bad idea. I am developing something myself and figured that having a quick sign up form on the main page would ease the sign up process instead of click on "Sign Up", go to another page, and then fill in the form. On the main page, if you like the site, it's a quick decision to just sign up then n there. My site requires a user to sign up before he/she can interact with other users (privacy concerns etc). So it's more important to me that the sign up is an easy process.
You are wasting the precious few seconds of first impression you get asking them to sign up for something they don't even know if they will like yet.
Bring them straight into the flow of your site, and let them signup only when they want to, not when you want to.
You can whet their appetite by showing other people interacting, no need for them to interact themselves.
Take YC for example, I bet there are hundreds of people who just lurk and read submissions/comments, but if they really wanted to reply to one of them, then they sign up.
The key thing that Zepolen points out that I think lots of people miss is your site/business/etc is about what 'they want', not what 'you want'.
Your business is about your customers. Customers don't want to sign-up, they want to explore or share travel (or whatever your site does).
I think i'm in one of the few markets where vistors are telling me they want a way to sign-up and get notifications, but that is after i've given them what they want, now they want more.
I only recently added the sign up box, and it's because I saw that Facebook was doing it. And I can say that for sites like mine which is not very popular, people need to understand what it is first before they're interested to sign up. And I can see the difference in sign up rate before and after I put the sign up on home page
I'm curious to know why a sign up on the main page is a bad, bad idea. I am developing something myself and figured that having a quick sign up form on the main page would ease the sign up process instead of click on "Sign Up", go to another page, and then fill in the form. On the main page, if you like the site, it's a quick decision to just sign up then n there. My site requires a user to sign up before he/she can interact with other users (privacy concerns etc). So it's more important to me that the sign up is an easy process.
Yes/No? What am I missing?