First Impressions Count for a Startup’s Launch Page
Hey, here’s a reason why we took so long with the launch page. You can read it, or you can conveniently read the summarised keynotes down at the very bottom.
In a previous life, I had stints at various videogames sites, magazines and even landed on Metacritic every week for my cunningly stellar dispositions and in-depth analysis on games like SEGA Dreamcast Collection. Fret not, they were free games. But other than lazily moping around, playing free onerous videogames, the task at hand was to always churn out articles. Good articles. Well written articles. Articles that beg for attention and ones that tug an IGN reader’s sweater, waiting to be read. It wasn’t easy. Playing free games had its moments, but when you’re typing that last article for the day just to fulfil your quota, that’s when it sucked. What’s worse than writing a 2,000 word article at 2am in the morning, though, is writing a 20-page Income Tax Law paper the day after that.
What does the first impressions of a startup’s launch page have to do anything with writing endless words of nothing? Well, in my experience, pretty much nothing other than that both consumed good chunks of time. That said, in their idiosyncratic differences, lessons can be learned.
In my case, as a previous staffer writing for both videogames and music publications, deadlines were everything. In my case, as a soon-to-graduate undergraduate Law student, assignment deadlines are the perennial deadlines to meet every month. After you click “Submit” on that Mario Kart review and after you hand in that 20-page Income Tax Law paper, there’s no going back. There’s no need for a perpetual revision because that’s your deadline and there’s no going back.
So yes, it felt like forever, but we finally finished doing up our launch page and this blog. Our Twitter page also looks a little different now because of the changes we had made to the rest of our pages. I personally never treated Esfeed’s design with an impinging deadline in mind. We felt like it was a top priority to convey Esfeed’s message with better propositions and to bolster its interface just to add more value for everyone else. Revising design is integral; it’s a perpetual process as more feedback is given. It’s only natural.
When readers loath the way you write your articles, they’ll close the window but they’ll eventually re-read your other articles down the line. When your assignment paper is far from “up to scratch”, you’ll be repeating that unit but you’ll have that second chance. But, when users don’t feel welcome in an estranged website, closing the window may mean that they may never come back again. First impressions aren’t everything, but they count for a web startup. We hope that the launch page conveyed our message to you, the reader, clearly.
If not, well, think Digg meets Google Wave.
Summary: Second chances don’t come in spades when you’re a web startup. Capitalize on the ones you currently have.
