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Ask HN: What type of splash page works better?

12 points by ch00ey ↗ HN
I've seen the anatomy of a perfect landing page (http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page). But, I've seen two types of splash pages that have generally worked:

1) Simple straight forward sign-up now page. such as: www.localmind.com and www.dayri.me

2) Content driven splash page. Such as: www.webpop.com and www.thinkfuse.com

So my question is: Which one is more effective? And why?

Thanks in advanced!

6 comments

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bobfunk
Co-founder of Webpop here. Honored to see our landing as one of your examples :)

We actually had exactly this discussion internally when we created our landing. We even had at least one prototype of the more mysterious kind with little more than a signup form.

I think both can work well, but for our beta we felt it was quite important that our users had an idea about what they signed up for. We're not doing a consumer product, and it wouldn't help us much getting lots of emails from people who would be completely lost when given access to a tool for professional web designers.

I suspect that being more mysterious would work well for sites with more of a social networking or entertainment focus.

atgm
The mysterious types of landing pages are complete turn-offs for me. If I go somewhere and see a place for my e-mail address with no real information on what I could be signing up for, I just leave and forget.

It takes a strong amount of buzz to override that impulse in me.

bobfunk
Feel the same way, but it seems there are quite a few people who are happy to put there email address just about anywhere pretty :)
GBond
Don't guess or make assumptions. A/B test both and make a decision based on hard numbers.
bobfunk
You need a high level of traffic before you can really start drawing any statistically meaningful conclusions from A/B testing. People don't magically start showing up just because you publish a landing page, so some assumptions are necessary for the first version.

Sites like http://fivesecondtest.com/ or http://www.usertesting.com/ are a lot more useful than A/B testing when you're about to launch your first landing.