Comment by ricardobeat
1 month ago
It's odd to see how people are not accustomed to plain websites anymore. You click the 'About' link in the footer, and get a direct explanation of what it is, pricing and the entire documentation.
1 month ago
It's odd to see how people are not accustomed to plain websites anymore. You click the 'About' link in the footer, and get a direct explanation of what it is, pricing and the entire documentation.
why do we need to click anything? Why wouldn't the relevant information be there in the initial view?
Gatekeeping mechanism. This effectively filters useless traffic and trash contacts.
You’re right that it probably filtered out a lot of traffic. Traffic that may have converted to users if they didn’t meet such a useless landing page
Given that this is an AD for the ten millionth VPS service, it should be upfront about the value proposition. Most people think its a game or something interesting and when they find out what it is they're disappointed. You dont want people associating that with your brand.
Even the 'About' page doesn't have much information either though
All the About page contains is:
> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without fuss. These machines are immediately accessible over HTTPS, with sensible and secure defaults. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc. With built-in optional authentication, so you can focus on your thing.
> Your VMs share CPU/RAM. Create as many VMs as you like with the resources you have.
As (probably?) their target audience, this is very clear to me. It’s a service to create persistent VMs and ssh into them. What’s missing?
Granted, navigation on mobile could be better – the “All docs” breadcrumb is the only way to find the pricing and rest of the docs. On desktop it is clearer.
What is the purpose of the landing page of this site, if it conveys nothing? Sure, 'about' explains what it is, but then from there I need to go back to a page that's called 'all docs' to see the link to pricing.
Don't defend this. It's not plain. It's obtuse.
A properly designed plain site will have the following text front and centre on it's hero:
"virtual machines in the cloud with persistent disks and sudo, starting from $20/month."
You truly, honestly believe that to be the real problem? Come on. You don't need to do whatever this is.
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