During our retreat out in Lanzarote (pic & pic), we were able to hammer out the new happytables beta. In the process, I quickly threw together a new landing page. It certainly wasn’t complete, but in the interest of shipping, I spent some of the early hours working on it. I finally had a chance to review the copy, mostly motivated by Nathan Barry’s post, in particular this part:
This time I turned to Google Docs and wrote in plain text. By getting design out of the way I was left to focus on convincing the visitor with content, rather than getting caught up in the design.
The comment resonated well with me as I often let the design guide the text (which is a horrible idea and a bad reflex). Starting with a blank doc however took care of that problem in one swoop. I’m quite happy with the result so far, 21% of viewers click through to the sign up form. More comments below the images.
Before
New
There are a couple big differences to the old design:
- High level promise instead of a description of the product
- Benefits vs. Features (radical difference in this case)
- Message is consistent: Make more money
- Convey what the build process entails
- Moved FAQ items to front page
As my writing is pretty crap, I had Siobhan have a look at it and she had some great comments via skype (the changes are already implemented above):
- I would change “generating revenue” to “making money”. “generating revenue” takes more thought to grasp instantly, some people won’t get it
- “Is your restaurant ready to generate revenue?” asks the question of the restaurant, but a restaurant isn’t something you can ask a question of, since it’s not a person
Your thoughts?
I have to say, I’m very happy so far but there’s a lot of room for improvement. A number of these changes were only possible because we also changed how the product functions (so this landing page couldn’t even have existed before).
What do you think?