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Clickable link to the startup I'm discussing in this blog post: http://www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

For my full opinions, see the blog post. I think most HNers would be better served by the best A/B testing library available for your platform of choice, but if your Aunt Cindy runs a business with a website, then Visual Website Optimizer will let her A/B test it without having to spend a few years in learning to speak geek first.

hmm I've seen that design somewhere before... Oh yeah: http://basecamphq.com . At least they uploaded the background images to their own server and didn't direct link them
hmm i've seen that statement somewhere before... oh yeah: the end of second paragraph under "Why I'm Particularly Impressed With This"
I mentioned in my blog post:

I have to say one thing, though, and it is straight out of the Economic History of Japan playbook: people don’t take copiers seriously, and it is a hard impression to shake once you’ve gotten it attached to you, fairly or otherwise. The design “inspired by” Basecamp is… ahem… well, suffice it to say that it does not demonstrate nearly as much originality as the software does. I’d hate for folks to write this startup off just for that, but first impressions matter.

Rather than taking (deserved) lumps for flying the Jolly Roger, I’d suggest folks to either use an open source web design, one of the attractive reasonably priced templates the Internet is overflowing with, or hire somebody with design skills to bang out something decent for v1.0.

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The wholesale ripoff of the Basecamp UI is just unforgivable. I can't believe they thought they'd get away with that.