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Take a look at my startup - Open-Collar: Work Smarter

5 points by afunnyfunnyman ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I've been working on this for about 9 months with a friend and just made a big update to our landing page. We are working on making a demo video that we will post as soon as its done!

Please let us know what you think, be as brutal or kind as you would like, we are looking for honest feed back.

www.Open-Collar.com

5 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] thread
kellros
Heya, I'd love to give some feedback.

First of all, the page load is really slow (1m 13s just now) - 61 requests, 485.7 KB total.

The idea seems very interesting (private social network for a business) and I really like the invitation letter at the bottom.

The helix ribbon at the top is totally random and doesn't provide anything meaningful. It also pushes the attention-grabbing content below the fold.

I think you guys got a cool idea and the overall design (minus the helix) is pretty good. The vision could do with some rephrasing to better enunciate the purpose (what's this, what's this for).

I'd suggest you go download Firefox and the following plugins: Firebug, Web Developer, YSlow, PageSpeed.

The first thing I'd do if I was you is run a YSlow benchmark (to see what needs improving - they also provide links to the theory behind the improvements and things you can do).

At the moment the current benchmark is: Grade C Overall performance score 70 Ruleset applied: YSlow(V2) URL: http://open-collar.com/

F Make fewer HTTP requests

F Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Avoid empty src or href

F Add Expires headers

F Compress components with gzip

A Put CSS at top

B Put JavaScript at bottom

A Avoid CSS expressions

n/a Make JavaScript and CSS external

A Reduce DNS lookups

A Minify JavaScript and CSS

A Avoid URL redirects

A Remove duplicate JavaScript and CSS

F Configure entity tags (ETags)

A Make AJAX cacheable

A Use GET for AJAX requests

A Reduce the number of DOM elements

A Avoid HTTP 404 (Not Found) error

A Reduce cookie size

F Use cookie-free domains

A Avoid AlphaImageLoader filter

A Do not scale images in HTML

A Make favicon small and cacheable

Good luck :)

shayzorblade
As Open-Collar's designer/developer THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. You have no idea how helpful this is.

I will be making changes today to try and speed up page-loading and we will be making textual changes as well.

Once again, thanks :)

Jarred
Here are my thoughts (in a stream of consciousness kind of way), the 2nd time I go to your site ordered by line. Beware, I may come off as harsh.

"Easier Way to Work" gives me no visual what 'Open-Collar' does.

When I think of the name 'Open-Collar' I think of someone getting relaxed (opening the top/2ndmost button on their collar).

What does it do?

That vision ("We're here to change how the world works") is really vague and I still don't know what you guys do.

I like the font.

You ask me to request an invite, but I still don't know what it does.

I'm extremely skeptical of any service claiming to be like Facebook in any way.

Why would I want another social network?

I'm not going to read what the feature does, I really don't care.

I don't think you copied the 'sign a card to request an invite' well from other people.

The "Send Message" button looks off.

shayzorblade
Jared, thanks for the comments.

A couple of quick questions: 1) Would you be willing to take another look? We made some changes last night a little while after you commented. 2) Could you be more specific about the "Request an Invite" box? What don't you like about it?