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Show HN: My Marketing Page Before and After

2 points by ulisesrmzroche ↗ HN
A few days ago I put up the first draft of my marketing page for critique, and I got good feedback and enough visitor data to get me going toward a second draft of my marketing page. The advice and research I got from it was very good, and I'd like to show ya'll the Before and After.

Here is a link to the screenshot of how it looked before:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8EKDJz2xKNvRkhNLUdkMjBkMVU/edit?usp=sharing

And you can see how it looks now at:

http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io

What I learned was that the subject of your illustration is really important. If you don't have a remarkable idea for it, no stock picture can save you. It was literally getting in the way, so I decided to cut it out. I think the headline has more power this way, and pulls its weight, but I miss the visual impact anyway, so I was thinking of listing portfolio projects in a slideshow in place of the illustration. Though I'd need to get some good ones under my belt first. I also sold my capabilities more and honed in on my target market, as was advised. This I thought was a better idea.

Also, I adjusted the contrast of the call-to-actions. Now I just have a single call to action on the page, Learn More, which now opens a modal that contains more information about me. But I tucked the second one, Contact, into a small label on the bottom right corner of the Learn Modal, that contains my phone number. I feel this may work better, but I'm going to experiment more with the contrast and see if I can find some middle ground.

In any case, thanks again for your time! I learned a lot from this and it really helped a lot. If you have any critique, I would be very grateful and have a good rest of your weekend!

9 comments

[ 398 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] thread
ulisesrmzroche
Clickable Links:

Before: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8EKDJz2xKNvRkhNLUdkMjBkMVU/...

After: http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987762

michaelpinto
1. Needs a shorter headline. Even something like "High Quality Web Apps on a Low Budget?"

2. Needs a call to action that doesn't require two clicks.

ulisesrmzroche
I really like that headline. I'm going to work off of that. Thank you! I agree on the call-to-action, and thanks for letting me know about that bug. It's supposed to take one click. I'll look into it right away.
n_coats
If I may, take a look through some of the bootstrap docs (both free and for-cost). They're amazing looking and incredibly simple to work with. If anything, some designs can provide you with styles to work off of.

Free Docs - http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

Buy - https://wrapbootstrap.com/

ulisesrmzroche
The site is running on Foundation 4, I'm on the mobile first camp. Thanks for the share to wrapboostrap though, didn't hear about them before.
caw
I can't say I'm a pro at this (I don't freelance and don't have a personal marketing page), so take this with a grain of salt:

> My claim to fame is that I shipped a large-scale Ember.js application, backed by a RESTful Rails API, tested all the way down to ie6, and somehow lived to tell about it.

While I find this funny, because I know what all the buzzwords mean, not everyone knows what RESTful, Rails, API, Ember.js, or IE6 is. Even if they know what IE6 is, they don't know what a pain it is to code for it.

> (From the other thread) I want to do code and marketing for local businesses, and coaching in project management. No hi-tech startups for now. The tech stack would be my advantage right now, I think, among all the other small web shops.

How is this tech stack and advantage? Why not wordpress and PHP, and slap some websites up in half a day? Local businesses definitely don't know what Ember.js is, and why should they care that you "live on it"?

You make this mention of "before I got into startups". Why not tell the story of how you've run/been in a small business just like them, and you've made some webapps that helped your brand. Then mention that pampelmoose and spiral16 (who they heck are these people, do they have real names or better known websites?), wrote some reviews on the marketing.

Change the passive voice to active (e.g. prefer "I did" to "it was done")

> I build high quality web applications that run a long time and sell more software despite having relatively little marketing or a low budget.

Good selling point.

> Thanks in advance for your time and consideration, and looking forward!

You missed a few words after "forward".

ulisesrmzroche
Thanks for your critique! I removed "and looking forward" as you noted it was lacking, and fixed the active tense issue that you noticed as well. As for your point about target market, I decided to focus on web development again, since that's really where my experience lies. I have never worked in a small business. I can't write honest copy that way.
ereckers
Ad some left and right padding to your container or body for iPad.

Also, it's a lot of text. Look into highlighting your personal tagline in headings, pull quotes or something like that.

Your top right language links (are they links?) aren't clickable on iPad.