Sorry, you are correct, they will be samples of Facebook pages made by the service. Sorry that it is unclear, I just felt it important to get feedback. Everything works though, the admin is functional and you can use the demo account provided on the sign up page.
Thanks, that is surely first on my list: "show don't tell."
Since I probably couldn't make compelling enough designs, I'll have to find some designers to work with.
Haha, I would have thought 93 was an outrageously big enough number so as to be an obvious exaggeration.
What I mean is that I am an aspiring web developer that happened to come from a non-related previous background. I chose not to go to college and after deciding to be a web developer, I just taught myself by building and building and building and building. I learned how to program horribly in PHP, and then I found Kohana and jquery which helped me code decently, and about 2 months ago I committed to learning Rails, built 3 Rails apps (including this one) and now I'd like to believe I'm pretty good!
You know, I think there is a lot of value in what you are saying. I mean literally what you are saying... "93 is believable". And you know what, you are right! I think that's a great startup lesson... 93 is believable!
Ah, but think of all the stuff you already know that does not work.
It's like the search for a lightbulb filament, you've probably learned more trying out that stuff than you'd have ever learned if your first trick had taken off. You are so much better prepared to really make a go of it once you find a live one.
If this really is your 93th attempt, I must commend you on your persistence, yet at the same time urge you to learn a little about lean startupping. It might save you another 100 failed attempts ;-)
The services I've seen focus on freemium and "ease of use" relative to non-developers/designers. Specifically pagemodo is a template generator.
I'm positioning aplanofattack as a service for designers/developers to use on behalf of their clients as a means to add to their product offering.
Pretty much exactly what http://campaignmonitor.com is for email newsletters. It gives freelancers and extra product to offer, without the infrastructure headache.
One of the things that I've noticed is that you have too much text on your home page. The fact that I had to scroll down isn't a good thing. You have to make a sale FAST to an internet user. Trust me they have extremely short attention spans. How about this?
Are you a designer forced to dance to FBs tune? Use aplanofattack to deploy hassle free and concentrate on what matters the most; beautiful, seamless design.
Wanna learn more? Check it out.
I would chip away those lines again and again until it sounds like the voice in their head is saying it to them.
Also, have you thought of making it an intermediate thing? As you've replied in the comments something like this already exists for non-technical users, and you want to target developers, but why don't you target them both?
It's a matter of UI design. You can just about recess the less commonly used, and more complex functions out of sight, or make different views like WP has a visual compose mode and a HTML mode that works pretty well. Also, it would be awesome for a developer short on time to jump into modes for that good enough mockup.
Are you a designer forced to dance to FBs tune? Use aplanofattack to deploy hassle free and concentrate on what matters the most; beautiful, seamless design.
I like that! Thanks for your input. I definitely hear you on the "show don't tell" aspect. Ideally I'd have a catchy line like the one you made and then a slideshow of beautifully designed Facebook pages with a link to the actual live FB instance.
My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful contacts/help and of course get some beta users.
As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.
I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your phrasing?
>>>I like that! Thanks for your input. I definitely hear you on the "show don't tell" aspect. Ideally I'd have a catchy line like the one you made and then a slideshow of beautifully designed Facebook pages with a link to the actual live FB instance.<<<
Don't do a slideshow either. It takes too long to load on a slower internet connection and people tend to lose interest by that time. Instead photoshop something like coverflow with 3 beautiful pages. I am not telling you to rip off coverflow. Don't do that. Your customers are very sensitive to such things
Make a draft layout on paper and play with it. Cut out pieces of paper and move it around on your desk.
>>>My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful contacts/help and of course get some beta users.<<<
I can understand that, but they are humans too and humans tend to get bored if they aren't engaged within those first 20-30 seconds. I am not asking you to make a fluff piece. No, I am asking you to make a hook to pull users in.
>>>As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.<<<
That sounds wise, but be careful not to box yourself in. I wish I could advise you more, but I haven't done any serious software development. So, I have no clue what challenges it brings on this side.
>>>I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your phrasing?<<<
Of course not! I'll be honored if you do so. :)
If you think that I can help you in anyway at all then don't hesitate to contact me at yesthisisananonymousid at googlemail
Thanks. I am not a designer per say so if anyone can help out with designing a couple sample facebook pages (for local businesses possibly), email me with a rate and/or we can work out some other agreement!
Serious question - what went wrong with the other 9,355 business attempts?
Where did things not come together - unable to get traffic, to get conversions, to get sales, to monetize...? How much did you work at it in the past before giving up and moving on? If you've had problems at a similar area each time , there might be a blind spot or mistake in how you do things around there that needs specific refinement, as opposed to general feedback.
My guess (from personal experience) you launch and... nothing happens. The life goes back to normal and you're seeing 30 visits/day in Google Analytics.
So you try sending out press releases, asking bloggers you know to mention your site, all those efforts result in a few spikes to 2-5K/day and then it goes back to 30. After a while you give up and move on to the next thing.
The tattoo and testimonial ideas both look they're fundamentally solid and workable, and would now require lots of Real Life Walking Around (TM) to compliment technical refinement.
For instance, this was part of Patrick Kalzumeus's (patio11 here on HN) plan when launching Appointment Reminder. Emphasis mine:
"This summer I’m going back to America for about a month to visit family, do a bit of consulting, and have something of a vacation. Over that time, I’m going to be taking the demo (or the product) on my laptop and showing it to as many service providers as I can stomach seeing. Thankfully, I expect that they’ll indulge my request for an interview — I intend to pay them their normal hourly, so coffee and a discussion of their industry and opinions about the software will work out just as well as offering a haircut/massage/etc would."
That's probably what you need at this point - showing your service to as many people in the business as you can stomach seeing. Face to face is different from behind a screen, much different. If you hate doing this and/or aren't good at it, that might be reason to partner with someone with has good face to face pitching/communicating/selling skills.
It's not exactly "giving up" per say, the path is more like continuous seemingly unrelated (but really related) iterations for the sake of finally gaining traction (with something, anything) but more concretely becoming a better and better and better developer in the meanwhile.
I have tried a lot of times not only because nothing worked (to my liking) but overwhelmingly because I learn by doing. So here goes.
I used to print t-shirts. I learned the entire t-shirt printing process from studying online. Not just hobby stuff, I actually grew to a warehouse with professional-grade equipment.
I decided I would try and create a website for my t-shirt printing business.
1) I built a complete back-end php/mysql system to manage and process orders. My dream was to have it fully automated on-line but that was pretty damned hard. So I just used it internally.
2) I decided to make an ecommerce website that sold my own t-shirt designs. Thinking I could design, produce, and fulfill tshirt orders from my own custom-made ecommerce system (not to mention actually marketing it online to you know ... get sales) is pretty damned hard.
3) A while later I realized it would be great if I could sell custom "tackle twill" hoodies online because most people don't realize how insanely great a tackle twill hoody can look. Everyone is used to seeing boring solid color College type hoodies. (i also did embroidery). I set out on building this great system that let customers design their hoodies online from a set of pre-defined fonts, colors, patterns, and apparel choices. It was GREAT for the level of developer I was at the time, but needless to say... it wasn't that great. Never finished it because it was too complex and not nearly on par with the competition.
I was doing all this as a hobby since I spent all my time printing shirts.
Then after a couple years I decided to go full-time web developing.
4) Took a year to seriously learn how to code, learned kohana and jquery and built a website that created websites. Pretty much like weebly, but a thousand times more complex (which is really bad!). It works pretty well and powers http://larasgift.com (I have a couple of clients). But all in all, making websites for people is a huge pain in the ass.
5) Created a website that was to be an improvement to wikipedia. It is/was a cool idea, but obviously who the hell am i kidding with that idea ... (how do i make money?)
6) Created http://pluspanda.com because through building the weebly clone, I realized local businesses don't really need whole entire websites. The internet is about word-of-mouth, referrals, and ... testimonials! (that's still live, just having trouble finding an acute market)
Here I learned that my coding was getting better but my productivity was suffering. Too much time wasted on stupid things. So after some deliberation I commited to learning Rails. I couldn't get Rails to work in Windows so what the hell, installed Ubuntu and become a command-line zen-master.
So now I'm riding the Rails on Ubuntu, source-controlling it with git so that i can deploy via capistrano and loving life chilling with the Linode production server.
7) http://tastyink.com was my first rails app that I built to learn Rails. I think this is a SOLID idea that I'm still working on but it's too complex of an idea to sell so I figured I needed a more dead simple IN to these local businesses which led to ...
These are the main projects that I've actually commited to trying, there are a handful of other projects not worth mentioning and of course freelance work every now and then.
The point is ......
I know I have an endless journey to become half as good as lots of people here on HN, but at the same time, I think I'm a pretty damned good developer nowada...
> Everyone tells me all the time "just stick to one project and stop abandoning everything"! I know that is sound advice. I know it! I just don't think of it as abandonment. I think of it as refinement. All of my projects have actually been perfectly inline with a core concept: Helping local businesses leverage the interent.
Good stuff. At some point you're going to have one on your hands that you have a pretty good feeling about and are excited about, and you're going to want to gear up on that one and do everything you can to make it work. Building to learn while refining is a great plan, you might get lucky and catch a really good break and have an idea take off on you. But don't count on that happening - it's actually quite unlikely, you'll have to gear up on one project specifically and pretty some serious focus on it to have it break through.
Good luck and best wishes! You've obviously got the moxy to make it, at some point when you've got one on your hands that you think has a nice mix of good market, offer, and that you enjoy working with, you gear up on it and make it a success.
Funny thing about most niche businesses is that they are about 10% software and 90% "the rest" (distribution, honing funnels, etc). Many/most software entrepreneurs fail because they really (when it comes down to it) just want to build stuff.
Nowadays (as an entrepreneur between projects), I'm pretty ruthless about avoiding any idea where I don't have 2-3 GREAT ideas on how I'm going to get customers for free/cheap.
If you're concentrating on small businesses, you have a tough road. They are notoriously hard to reach in a cost-effective way (many investors run away screaming if you say that your target market is SMBs-- with good reason).
Instant impressions: Page loads too slowly. Too much text. Dislike the name.
The text in the yellow is hard to read, why are certain words in an even more yellow background?
The secondary marketing line isn't quite english:
"Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!"
I'd change that top bit to say:
> Create facebook pages for your clients with our WYSIWYG editor.
> A simple one page promotion page on Facebook is easily worth $500 for your clients. Design and sell them with A Plan of Attack today!
The problem with your text is that it's challenging and instills doubt. Am I good enough of a designer? Maybe not, oh well lets not bother. You want to say: Is a simple one page promotion page worth $500 to your clients companies? fuck yes - and we let you make them trivially!
"sell" is a bad word - especially to designers. Maybe "earn $500 by making your clients facebook landing pages" if that doesn't sound too dodgy.
The images on the right are just grey boxes, the login link should be top right. Let me create a page without signing up. (make the demo account auto login and obvious)
The sign up button should probably be on the right hand side of the page, i dislike how it turns red (too jarring)
The "Aplanofattack is in beta..." paragraph should be added on the sign up page, if not later. Sounds too sketchy on the first page.
Reiterate the service is free - on the sign up button.
Stick a contact button more obviously on the home page.
Kudos for saying "benefits at a glance" and not "Features at a glance" but now remove 80% of the words below that header.
A. Fewer words, more action or pictures. You've heard this already.
B. Wordsmithing. You need a copy editor, with a degree in English or its moral equivalent, to go over every line of this with you. Let's take apart just the third sentence:
Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!
"How good of a [X]" is a very awkward phrase in print. It might work in very casual spoken English, but in print it looks amateurish. Starting a sentence with "probably" is likewise too casual. Your customer base is made of designers. They often care about such details.
You should also consider avoiding the exclamation point. Heed the words of Elmore Leonard: "You are allowed no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 words of prose."
Now, having marginally improved the sentence by changing it to something like:
It probably depends on how talented a designer you are.
...you should delete this sentence altogether, because it is an awful sales pitch. You are, literally, questioning the skill of your prospective customer. Let me translate this opening:
If people aren't paying you $200 to $500 to design simple things, you probably suck!
Guess what? Your prospective customer is probably not currently being paid $200 to $500 for custom Facebook pages. If your customer already knew how to build these pages, he or she would not be shopping for your product. So your opening pitch can be further distilled to:
Dear customer: You suck!
Ouch. Get the whole thing off the page and replace it with something more like this:
Customers will pay you $200 to $500 for custom-designed Facebook pages, and you can build them in minutes with this tool.
Only with fewer words.
C. For a product that offers to simplify a complicated process, the home page looks awfully complicated. Too much technical jargon. Don't write things like this:
Forget about learning XFBML, FBML, FBJS, FQL.
You are trying to convince your customer that they need not learn or even think about these acronyms. So don't name-drop them. That's like trying to sell a Caribbean vacation by saying:
Forget about sharks, food poisoning, skin cancer, or pickpockets.
Make the prose on the page be as easy and soothing as the product is meant to be. Speak to your audience. Don't use any technical terms except those that your customers need to know: "HTML" and "CSS". If a subset of your customers needs to know about the XFBML, put it in the FAQ.
D. The name. I hate to have to say it, it's like picking on someone's kids, but "A Plan Of Attack" is not a good product name. It doesn't suggest Facebook, it doesn't suggest design, it doesn't sound like the name of an application or product, it contains too many words, and it starts with an "A" which will turn your word-of-mouth recommendations into an Abbott and Costello sketch:
A: "What should I use for my simple Facebook pages?"
B: "'A Plan Of Attack'"
A: "Which plan of attack?"
B: "No, that's a spreadsheet. Use 'A Plan Of Attack'"
A: "Did you even hear my question?"
B: "Third base!"
E. A/B testing. Clearly you should not accept my word for any of this. I have no idea how to sell your product. All I have are hypotheses. So be sure you have a method for testing and winnowing hypotheses.
Good luck! If I ever need a custom Facebook page I will be sure to try your product.
Most English majors cannot write copy, unless they are trained to. Advertising and promotional copy are very different beasts than English. Find a copy writer instead and not some random English major.
Hee hee. No sooner did I press "submit" and head out the door than I thought "oops, someone is going to take me literally about that 'English major' line which I tossed off half-seriously. Maybe I should have phrased that differently."
I can't really comment on the viability/marketability of your product concept, but I will offer this very important, if not somewhat trite, piece of advice. If you are going to try to sell something to designers and use words like aesthetics in your sales copy, you will most likely fail if your own presentation is not aesthetically pleasing. Others have given some great suggestions below. I just want to emphasize that before you work to send any traffic to your site you should greatly enhance the look.
First off, and most importantly: the business idea itself is sound. I'm saying that as a guy who's transitioning into doing a lot of stuff on FB, and it's a frustrating process. This factor is more important than anything else.
The homepage is a good start, but could be slimmed down and needs to be more visual, as others have already said.
The actual admin though (I signed up) is a bit chaotic. The list of widgets is only one widget and I don't really understand how it all works together. The code editor looks great: I'd suggest having some sort of drag and drop interface that pulls the widget UI and the code editing UI together.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 67.9 ms ] threadHacker News has pretty much been my cofounder, investor, mentor and friend all rolled into one. So as always, thanks everyone.
If you like the concept please feel free to "Like" my application here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=129421017095...
This will help me do some customer development and also get my Facebook url (without the identifer).
http://www.uploadscreenshot.com/image/91811/1706063
Are the boxes intentionally gray placeholders that you'll replace with screenshots or the like?
What I mean is that I am an aspiring web developer that happened to come from a non-related previous background. I chose not to go to college and after deciding to be a web developer, I just taught myself by building and building and building and building. I learned how to program horribly in PHP, and then I found Kohana and jquery which helped me code decently, and about 2 months ago I committed to learning Rails, built 3 Rails apps (including this one) and now I'd like to believe I'm pretty good!
Don't feel bad for me, because I love it! Thanks
I like that! I will take your advice.
It's like the search for a lightbulb filament, you've probably learned more trying out that stuff than you'd have ever learned if your first trick had taken off. You are so much better prepared to really make a go of it once you find a live one.
I know of http://northsocial.com/ which is nicely done.
Also this writeup on http://pagemodo.com @ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/04/facebook-tab-creator-pagemo... lists some services in the comments.
The services I've seen focus on freemium and "ease of use" relative to non-developers/designers. Specifically pagemodo is a template generator.
I'm positioning aplanofattack as a service for designers/developers to use on behalf of their clients as a means to add to their product offering.
Pretty much exactly what http://campaignmonitor.com is for email newsletters. It gives freelancers and extra product to offer, without the infrastructure headache.
Thanks for your help.
Are you a designer forced to dance to FBs tune? Use aplanofattack to deploy hassle free and concentrate on what matters the most; beautiful, seamless design.
Wanna learn more? Check it out.
I would chip away those lines again and again until it sounds like the voice in their head is saying it to them.
Also, have you thought of making it an intermediate thing? As you've replied in the comments something like this already exists for non-technical users, and you want to target developers, but why don't you target them both?
It's a matter of UI design. You can just about recess the less commonly used, and more complex functions out of sight, or make different views like WP has a visual compose mode and a HTML mode that works pretty well. Also, it would be awesome for a developer short on time to jump into modes for that good enough mockup.
I like that! Thanks for your input. I definitely hear you on the "show don't tell" aspect. Ideally I'd have a catchy line like the one you made and then a slideshow of beautifully designed Facebook pages with a link to the actual live FB instance.
My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful contacts/help and of course get some beta users.
As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.
I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your phrasing?
Don't do a slideshow either. It takes too long to load on a slower internet connection and people tend to lose interest by that time. Instead photoshop something like coverflow with 3 beautiful pages. I am not telling you to rip off coverflow. Don't do that. Your customers are very sensitive to such things
Make a draft layout on paper and play with it. Cut out pieces of paper and move it around on your desk.
>>>My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful contacts/help and of course get some beta users.<<<
I can understand that, but they are humans too and humans tend to get bored if they aren't engaged within those first 20-30 seconds. I am not asking you to make a fluff piece. No, I am asking you to make a hook to pull users in.
>>>As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.<<<
That sounds wise, but be careful not to box yourself in. I wish I could advise you more, but I haven't done any serious software development. So, I have no clue what challenges it brings on this side.
>>>I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your phrasing?<<<
Of course not! I'll be honored if you do so. :)
If you think that I can help you in anyway at all then don't hesitate to contact me at yesthisisananonymousid at googlemail
P.S.- Do I get a free account? :p
you are trying to sell design services...your sales page should show the high quality of your product
Where did things not come together - unable to get traffic, to get conversions, to get sales, to monetize...? How much did you work at it in the past before giving up and moving on? If you've had problems at a similar area each time , there might be a blind spot or mistake in how you do things around there that needs specific refinement, as opposed to general feedback.
So you try sending out press releases, asking bloggers you know to mention your site, all those efforts result in a few spikes to 2-5K/day and then it goes back to 30. After a while you give up and move on to the next thing.
Did I guess right?
http://plusjade.com/
The tattoo and testimonial ideas both look they're fundamentally solid and workable, and would now require lots of Real Life Walking Around (TM) to compliment technical refinement.
For instance, this was part of Patrick Kalzumeus's (patio11 here on HN) plan when launching Appointment Reminder. Emphasis mine:
"This summer I’m going back to America for about a month to visit family, do a bit of consulting, and have something of a vacation. Over that time, I’m going to be taking the demo (or the product) on my laptop and showing it to as many service providers as I can stomach seeing. Thankfully, I expect that they’ll indulge my request for an interview — I intend to pay them their normal hourly, so coffee and a discussion of their industry and opinions about the software will work out just as well as offering a haircut/massage/etc would."
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/05/14/unveiling-my-second-prod...
That's probably what you need at this point - showing your service to as many people in the business as you can stomach seeing. Face to face is different from behind a screen, much different. If you hate doing this and/or aren't good at it, that might be reason to partner with someone with has good face to face pitching/communicating/selling skills.
I have tried a lot of times not only because nothing worked (to my liking) but overwhelmingly because I learn by doing. So here goes.
I used to print t-shirts. I learned the entire t-shirt printing process from studying online. Not just hobby stuff, I actually grew to a warehouse with professional-grade equipment.
I decided I would try and create a website for my t-shirt printing business.
1) I built a complete back-end php/mysql system to manage and process orders. My dream was to have it fully automated on-line but that was pretty damned hard. So I just used it internally.
2) I decided to make an ecommerce website that sold my own t-shirt designs. Thinking I could design, produce, and fulfill tshirt orders from my own custom-made ecommerce system (not to mention actually marketing it online to you know ... get sales) is pretty damned hard.
3) A while later I realized it would be great if I could sell custom "tackle twill" hoodies online because most people don't realize how insanely great a tackle twill hoody can look. Everyone is used to seeing boring solid color College type hoodies. (i also did embroidery). I set out on building this great system that let customers design their hoodies online from a set of pre-defined fonts, colors, patterns, and apparel choices. It was GREAT for the level of developer I was at the time, but needless to say... it wasn't that great. Never finished it because it was too complex and not nearly on par with the competition.
I was doing all this as a hobby since I spent all my time printing shirts. Then after a couple years I decided to go full-time web developing.
4) Took a year to seriously learn how to code, learned kohana and jquery and built a website that created websites. Pretty much like weebly, but a thousand times more complex (which is really bad!). It works pretty well and powers http://larasgift.com (I have a couple of clients). But all in all, making websites for people is a huge pain in the ass.
5) Created a website that was to be an improvement to wikipedia. It is/was a cool idea, but obviously who the hell am i kidding with that idea ... (how do i make money?)
6) Created http://pluspanda.com because through building the weebly clone, I realized local businesses don't really need whole entire websites. The internet is about word-of-mouth, referrals, and ... testimonials! (that's still live, just having trouble finding an acute market)
Here I learned that my coding was getting better but my productivity was suffering. Too much time wasted on stupid things. So after some deliberation I commited to learning Rails. I couldn't get Rails to work in Windows so what the hell, installed Ubuntu and become a command-line zen-master.
So now I'm riding the Rails on Ubuntu, source-controlling it with git so that i can deploy via capistrano and loving life chilling with the Linode production server.
7) http://tastyink.com was my first rails app that I built to learn Rails. I think this is a SOLID idea that I'm still working on but it's too complex of an idea to sell so I figured I needed a more dead simple IN to these local businesses which led to ...
8) http://aplanofattack.com
These are the main projects that I've actually commited to trying, there are a handful of other projects not worth mentioning and of course freelance work every now and then.
I know I have an endless journey to become half as good as lots of people here on HN, but at the same time, I think I'm a pretty damned good developer nowada...Good stuff. At some point you're going to have one on your hands that you have a pretty good feeling about and are excited about, and you're going to want to gear up on that one and do everything you can to make it work. Building to learn while refining is a great plan, you might get lucky and catch a really good break and have an idea take off on you. But don't count on that happening - it's actually quite unlikely, you'll have to gear up on one project specifically and pretty some serious focus on it to have it break through.
Good luck and best wishes! You've obviously got the moxy to make it, at some point when you've got one on your hands that you think has a nice mix of good market, offer, and that you enjoy working with, you gear up on it and make it a success.
Nowadays (as an entrepreneur between projects), I'm pretty ruthless about avoiding any idea where I don't have 2-3 GREAT ideas on how I'm going to get customers for free/cheap.
If you're concentrating on small businesses, you have a tough road. They are notoriously hard to reach in a cost-effective way (many investors run away screaming if you say that your target market is SMBs-- with good reason).
The text in the yellow is hard to read, why are certain words in an even more yellow background?
The secondary marketing line isn't quite english:
"Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!"
I'd change that top bit to say:
> Create facebook pages for your clients with our WYSIWYG editor.
> A simple one page promotion page on Facebook is easily worth $500 for your clients. Design and sell them with A Plan of Attack today!
The problem with your text is that it's challenging and instills doubt. Am I good enough of a designer? Maybe not, oh well lets not bother. You want to say: Is a simple one page promotion page worth $500 to your clients companies? fuck yes - and we let you make them trivially!
"sell" is a bad word - especially to designers. Maybe "earn $500 by making your clients facebook landing pages" if that doesn't sound too dodgy.
The images on the right are just grey boxes, the login link should be top right. Let me create a page without signing up. (make the demo account auto login and obvious)
The sign up button should probably be on the right hand side of the page, i dislike how it turns red (too jarring)
The "Aplanofattack is in beta..." paragraph should be added on the sign up page, if not later. Sounds too sketchy on the first page.
Reiterate the service is free - on the sign up button.
Stick a contact button more obviously on the home page.
Kudos for saying "benefits at a glance" and not "Features at a glance" but now remove 80% of the words below that header.
B. Wordsmithing. You need a copy editor, with a degree in English or its moral equivalent, to go over every line of this with you. Let's take apart just the third sentence:
Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!
"How good of a [X]" is a very awkward phrase in print. It might work in very casual spoken English, but in print it looks amateurish. Starting a sentence with "probably" is likewise too casual. Your customer base is made of designers. They often care about such details.
You should also consider avoiding the exclamation point. Heed the words of Elmore Leonard: "You are allowed no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 words of prose."
Now, having marginally improved the sentence by changing it to something like:
It probably depends on how talented a designer you are.
...you should delete this sentence altogether, because it is an awful sales pitch. You are, literally, questioning the skill of your prospective customer. Let me translate this opening:
If people aren't paying you $200 to $500 to design simple things, you probably suck!
Guess what? Your prospective customer is probably not currently being paid $200 to $500 for custom Facebook pages. If your customer already knew how to build these pages, he or she would not be shopping for your product. So your opening pitch can be further distilled to:
Dear customer: You suck!
Ouch. Get the whole thing off the page and replace it with something more like this:
Customers will pay you $200 to $500 for custom-designed Facebook pages, and you can build them in minutes with this tool.
Only with fewer words.
C. For a product that offers to simplify a complicated process, the home page looks awfully complicated. Too much technical jargon. Don't write things like this:
Forget about learning XFBML, FBML, FBJS, FQL.
You are trying to convince your customer that they need not learn or even think about these acronyms. So don't name-drop them. That's like trying to sell a Caribbean vacation by saying:
Forget about sharks, food poisoning, skin cancer, or pickpockets.
Make the prose on the page be as easy and soothing as the product is meant to be. Speak to your audience. Don't use any technical terms except those that your customers need to know: "HTML" and "CSS". If a subset of your customers needs to know about the XFBML, put it in the FAQ.
D. The name. I hate to have to say it, it's like picking on someone's kids, but "A Plan Of Attack" is not a good product name. It doesn't suggest Facebook, it doesn't suggest design, it doesn't sound like the name of an application or product, it contains too many words, and it starts with an "A" which will turn your word-of-mouth recommendations into an Abbott and Costello sketch:
E. A/B testing. Clearly you should not accept my word for any of this. I have no idea how to sell your product. All I have are hypotheses. So be sure you have a method for testing and winnowing hypotheses.Good luck! If I ever need a custom Facebook page I will be sure to try your product.
I agree with you, of course.
Moral: everyone could use a copy editor. ;)
The homepage is a good start, but could be slimmed down and needs to be more visual, as others have already said.
The actual admin though (I signed up) is a bit chaotic. The list of widgets is only one widget and I don't really understand how it all works together. The code editor looks great: I'd suggest having some sort of drag and drop interface that pulls the widget UI and the code editing UI together.