4 ms·

The advice is begin sentences with "You" or a verb. Seems like weird advice. There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/ https://

The advice is begin sentences with "You" or a verb. Seems like weird advice. There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/ https://www.7-zip.org/ Following their rules would make it cringe-worthy. Maybe for certain audiences, in certain types of corporate website, their advice is good, but the article doesn't define the domain to which the advice applies.

jacobush 8y ago
If think it can depend on how much the audience is expected to know about the topic and product beforehand. With 7-zip I'd expect much of the target audience knows about it, or at least knows what a zip program in general is. When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".
- abainbridge 8y ago
  I mostly agree. I just don't think the "you" thing works on engineers. If an engineer doesn't know anything about your product, they want facts about your product.
  - sacado2 8y ago
    It depends. The secret is first to address the customers' problems, then detail technical features. First, hook you with emotions, then shut your critical brain with facts. For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ : "Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
    - bshimmin 8y ago
      I actually find it weird and a bit annoying that Rust's landing page doesn't mention that it's a programming language (it's in the page title and in one of the testimonials). I'm struggling to find another programming language's landing page that doesn't explicitly say it's a programming language!
      - w-m 8y ago
        It used to say "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" until the recent redesign. It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
    - anoncake 8y ago
      I thought the hidden message was "you're an idiot, but with Rust even someone like you can build reliable and efficient software"
  - _up 8y ago
    What's a more important fact/thing you want to know first? That the software "XYZ", can ingest 1M data points per hour or that it can actually solve "your specific problem". Given that you never heard about "XYZ" before.
abainbridge 8y ago
My GCSE English teacher insisted that when you write anything you should ask yourself who the audience is. If your audience is scientists or engineers, then give them facts. This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it. Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.
- tim-- 8y ago
  Yes, but you could also say that today's Perforce is completely different from the Perforce of a decade ago. Firstly, you don't need to pay for the Perforce you did 10 years ago. Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.
sacado2 8y ago
You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems? "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code." vs "Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive". Or, if you're promoting free software: "You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software". Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
  - sacado2 8y ago
    Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
coldtea 8y ago
>There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/* https://www.7-zip.org/* That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
If I had my way, that would just be a giant animation of zeroes and ones being put into compact packages which get unpacked at their destination. The text wouldn't be about "archives", and certainly wouldn't have a list of file extensions. No, it would be about how this product is all about allowing you to create, to be more. Which, after all, is what being about is all about. Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.
mcbits 8y ago
I had never even read 7-Zip's landing page until now, even though it is always one of the first programs I install on Windows. The page is just fine for that purpose because the download link is clearly marked at the top of the page. To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page: "7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything." "You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip." I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!

jacobush 8y ago

If think it can depend on how much the audience is expected to know about the topic and product beforehand. With 7-zip I'd expect much of the target audience knows about it, or at least knows what a zip program in general is. When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".

abainbridge 8y ago
I mostly agree. I just don't think the "you" thing works on engineers. If an engineer doesn't know anything about your product, they want facts about your product.
- sacado2 8y ago
  It depends. The secret is first to address the customers' problems, then detail technical features. First, hook you with emotions, then shut your critical brain with facts. For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ : "Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
  - bshimmin 8y ago
    I actually find it weird and a bit annoying that Rust's landing page doesn't mention that it's a programming language (it's in the page title and in one of the testimonials). I'm struggling to find another programming language's landing page that doesn't explicitly say it's a programming language!
    - w-m 8y ago
      It used to say "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" until the recent redesign. It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
  - anoncake 8y ago
    I thought the hidden message was "you're an idiot, but with Rust even someone like you can build reliable and efficient software"
- _up 8y ago
  What's a more important fact/thing you want to know first? That the software "XYZ", can ingest 1M data points per hour or that it can actually solve "your specific problem". Given that you never heard about "XYZ" before.

abainbridge 8y ago

My GCSE English teacher insisted that when you write anything you should ask yourself who the audience is. If your audience is scientists or engineers, then give them facts. This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it. Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.

tim-- 8y ago
Yes, but you could also say that today's Perforce is completely different from the Perforce of a decade ago. Firstly, you don't need to pay for the Perforce you did 10 years ago. Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.

sacado2 8y ago

You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems? "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code." vs "Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive". Or, if you're promoting free software: "You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software". Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
- sacado2 8y ago
  Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".

coldtea 8y ago

>There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/* https://www.7-zip.org/* That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

If I had my way, that would just be a giant animation of zeroes and ones being put into compact packages which get unpacked at their destination. The text wouldn't be about "archives", and certainly wouldn't have a list of file extensions. No, it would be about how this product is all about allowing you to create, to be more. Which, after all, is what being about is all about. Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.

mcbits 8y ago

I had never even read 7-Zip's landing page until now, even though it is always one of the first programs I install on Windows. The page is just fine for that purpose because the download link is clearly marked at the top of the page. To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page: "7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything." "You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip." I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!