- it isn't immediately obvious to me what the differentiators are for your product vs. competition
- Brighten up the site. Your audience may be technical, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't like colour. Of course, these things are subjective.
- might want to make the screenshot even larger - or zoom into an interesting feature. Visuals break up the page and draw the eye.
+ the quote at the top is good
- you say 'the four best ways to manage your server' and then make the user search thru a paragraph of text to figure out what you mean. Call the 4 ways out with more emphasis..
- don't think you need the 'The New Virtualmin.com' section. It's like a sausage maker boasting about improvements to their factory... Perhaps you could make better use of that space by focusing on the product.
- Use more visuals - perhaps to highlight the top 3 features of your product
There are more positives than I have mentioned but calling out what needs to be improved would probably be of more use to you.
Thanks for the pointers. All good advice, and I agree with most of it.
I won't comment on the too much text any further, since all YC newsies agree. I will cut text with reckless abandon.
I've rejiggered the "four ways" paragraph to put what those ways are in the first sentence.
I agree about more color...being weak on design limits my capacity to actually do so without making it look like angry fruit salad. I've forced myself to use a very limited palette of carefully selected colors to avoid that problem. But I'll see about getting some more accent colors in their. I do plan to add screenshots to the About/Find out more page.
As for the "new Virtualmin.com" part, I think we probably do need it for another few weeks. We had 4000+ registered users, and 500+ paying customers, on the old site, and I had to issue them new usernames and passwords (derived from the old...but the new policies prevent the old from working as they were). So, even though I sent them all email about the change, not everyone got that email, and might need some guidance on getting logged in with the new details. It will go away soon, though, to be replaced by a "news" section, probably.
Hrm. I didn't like the quote at the top myself. I thought it focused too much on the people making the thing, rather than something like "Thanks to Virtualmin, I can manage 31415926 servers in just 10 minutes a day!" or "Here at hornywetsluts dot com, virtualmin has been a blessing - it let us take our business to the next level"... Something customer focused, in short.
I'll point out the non-obvious fact that everyone is seeing a different quote, every time they load the page. So, the quote you didn't like is probably not the same one the parent did. ;-)
It's just nice things people have been telling us lately. The selection of quotes will grow over time.
I should probably grill you two to find out exactly which quotes you did and didn't like.
- too much text.
- it isn't immediately obvious to me what the differentiators are for your product vs. competition
- Brighten up the site. Your audience may be technical, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't like colour. Of course, these things are subjective.
- might want to make the screenshot even larger - or zoom into an interesting feature. Visuals break up the page and draw the eye.
+ the quote at the top is good
- you say 'the four best ways to manage your server' and then make the user search thru a paragraph of text to figure out what you mean. Call the 4 ways out with more emphasis..
- don't think you need the 'The New Virtualmin.com' section. It's like a sausage maker boasting about improvements to their factory... Perhaps you could make better use of that space by focusing on the product. - Use more visuals - perhaps to highlight the top 3 features of your product
There are more positives than I have mentioned but calling out what needs to be improved would probably be of more use to you.