Ask HN: What do you think of our redesigned website?

by nkohari • 17 years ago

11 21 17 years ago

amackera• 17 years ago

I don't know what it looked like before, but this looks good!

nkohari8• 17 years ago

When we originally launched our public-facing website for Zen in May, the product was still under heavy development, and we had very few screenshots. Now that the product has stabilized, we've redesigned our marketing site to try to showcase the product a little better.

Any feedback is most welcome!

jaymedavis• 17 years ago

Looks awesome, really clean and simple.

AhtiK• 17 years ago

Good overall look. But IMHO 4 screenshots at the front-page do not provide enough detail. It took more than a minute to figure out that those 4 thumbnails are meant to be clicked.

I think I also liked the site design that was up ~1mo ago. Plus the product itself is also very nice.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Thanks. I might try to funnel visitors towards the video tour more, since that's where the product is really showcased. The screenshots are just meant to grab your attention. :)

lrm242• 17 years ago

I think it looks good. The only thing that jumped out at me was how much vertical space you're giving up for the logo and banzai tree. This is pushing valuable information down below the fold. Also, on the home page you might consider pulling your signup button up above the fold.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Good point. I typically don't believe in the fold, but we are using up a lot of content area for the "splash" artifacts.

datawalke• 17 years ago

Looking good. It is nice and clean. However I would really like to see something to describe the four screenshots. Maybe underneath them a little black box that spans across the width of the 4 images that has a little arrow overlapping right on the bottom of each screenshot describing what it does.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Good idea. Captions would help. I might also see if there's a way I can direct users to the associated part of the video tour from the screenshots.

shafqat• 17 years ago

Looks great. But the big green pricing/plans button was below the fold for me! Can you move it higher?

staunch• 17 years ago

The screenshots on the front seem poor to me. They're very light and empty -- not exciting at all. Four seems like too many. I didn't even realize you could click them at first, maybe add a magnifying glass in the corner?

No obviously call to action on the front page. I didn't feel like there was an obvious next page to click on to.

Overall nice, but being honest: a bit generic/standard/derivative.

DanielStraight3• 17 years ago

Agreed. I would go with 2 or 3 pictures, slightly larger by default, and showing screens that look like they're from people who actually use the product. Showing empty sections on the screenshots is just depressing. If I want something to sit empty, it can be anything. It doesn't have to be your product.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Re: call-to-action, it's between the signup button and the video tour. I might try to make the video tour link stand out a bit more, though.

The product itself is (intentionally) sparse and understated. This leads to (we think) a great user experience, but doesn't result in very good screenshots. :) We also didn't really want to overwhelm the user with a complex display of features, because our value proposition is being simpler and easier to use than our competition.

Good points, though.

sunkencity• 17 years ago

Looks good, but move your javascripts out of the head and place them last before </html> that way you can avoid the page stalling and being white before showing content, it's a bit laggy now and flashes white for half a sec or so. When firefox (and some other browsers too, I think) encounter javascript they stop rendering until they have parsed the javascript.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

It's funny, I knew that, and then somehow I still put it in the header. :) Thanks.

workhorse• 17 years ago

That is a great design, very nice work.

DanielStraight3• 17 years ago

A suggestion on the video tour: Put the "start here" video on the tour page itself. In typical user fasion, by the time I got to the page I forgot why I was there, so it didn't even occur to me to look for a video until I went back and remembered I clicked video tour. Then I went back to the video tour page and wondered why there was no video on it.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Yeah, I'm on the fence about the tour start page, with the four summaries (http://agilezen.com/tour). I might just ditch it and funnel users directly into the first step of the tour. The summaries don't add enough to risk bouncing people before they get to the videos.

DanielStraight3• 17 years ago

Or even just show a typical video link with screenshot from video and play button in the middle.

GiraffeNecktie• 17 years ago

The free pricing plan seems too restrictive. If I'm going to evaluate it's usefulness for a team, I'll need to get buy-in from at least one other person and see how it works when several people are contributing.

nkohari8• 17 years ago

Yeah, it's tough to find a balance with freemium pricing. The restrictive free account is one of the reasons we introduced the 30-day money-back guarantee. It's actually baked into the software, so if you cancel your account (or downgrade to the free plan) in the first 30 days, it automatically refunds your money.

We have considered adding one collaborator to the free plan. We've taken the stance of starting with it very restrictive and then sizing it up if necessary, because it's much harder to go the other way and take things away from users. :)

Ask HN: What do you think of our redesigned website?

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