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Hey I remember you from the early days of HN! Please take this feedback as coming from a good place with good intentions. 1. The website and product would bene

Hey I remember you from the early days of HN! Please take this feedback as coming from a good place with good intentions. 1. The website and product would benefit from having a designer involved. There is a design fashion that changes about every five years or so and you're a couple cycles behind. 2. Get someone that needs your software to talk through the copy. "Merge, split, clean, dedupe, reformat and more" into what? From where? Is this online or downloadable? Does this work for my specific workflow? 3. Screenshot looks like it is on a Mac. Is it Mac only? If not, put a Windows screenshot right next to it. I know after you scroll down it shows Windows support, but that can be easily missed. 4. Block quote testimonials: Bold or highlight the most relevant part. I'm not reading a paragraph, I'm scanning. 5. Fix the about page. Many Excel files have sensitive data and people click about to make sure that they can trust the company. You need better, more reassuring copy and a better picture. Asking for feedback is fine, but the current copy borders on "this is really new and may not be reliable" territory. 6. If your target demographic is Excel pros, explain why user defined functions or macros couldn't or shouldn't accomplish the same task that you help with. Hope this helps and best of luck!

hermitcrab 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. 1. It looks pretty modern to me. I'm not selling to web designers, so I'm too bothered with keeping up with all the latest trends, I just need the web design to be 'good enough' to be credible. 2. I think that information is all on the front page, isn't it? I don't want to make the tag line too wordy. 3. The screenshot is Mac. But it says Windows and Mac further down. 4. I've kept the testimonials short, but bolding might be worth a try. 5. Pretty much the same 'about' page seems fine for my other 2 products. Also, no-one much goes to the 'about' page. One of the advantages of my product is that your data stays on your computer. 6. Fair comment, but I don't think they would be on my website if they we happy with just Excel!
- frequentnapper 7y ago
  the design looks modern and clear to me as well. I don't think that's the issue.
- oulu2006 7y ago
  Agree with the OP, the website needs a designers touch, it does look dated. The general standard of websites is so much higher these days, if it looks cramped and dated I don't linger. Testimonials are too long as well.
  - hermitcrab 7y ago
    What would you consider some good examples of modern websites for desktop software? BTW You would probably also consider the design of https://www.perfecttableplan.com https://www.perfecttableplan.com dated. But that converts visitors to downloads just fine.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      I disagree with the other users I think it looks fine. I think the biggest differences is perfect table plan focuses on a very concrete idea that is easy to communicate and uses a paradigm people are familiar with (looking at a seating chart). I was able figure out what it did within 5 seconds of looking at the website. But data transformations are a fairly abstract concept. Most users I imagine don't think "I need to transform my data", they probably think of the problem more concretely like "I need to deduplicate this giant excel spreadsheet". They will be glancing at the website asking themselves the question "Will this deduplicate my giant excel spreadsheet?" and the first picture they see will be a dataflow diagram. The user has probably never seen a dataflow diagram, and only rarely will they have done in gui based programming before. They will probably think "This might deduplicate my giant excel spreadsheet after I learn a bunch of hard stuff about how to wire these different boxes together". Before ever realizing how easy your app is to use. If I were you, I'd replace data transformations with something like "Excel power tasks", and then have a list of all the tasks you can do, like deduplicate, concatenate, merge columns, etc. all with 15 second videos showing how easy your application makes accomplishing these tasks. So users lands on site, sees a list of the tasks they might want to accomplish, clicks it, watches 15 second video showing them how ridiculously easy your app makes performing that task. Btw the apps look really awesome.
      - 7y ago

hermitcrab 7y ago

Thanks for the feedback. 1. It looks pretty modern to me. I'm not selling to web designers, so I'm too bothered with keeping up with all the latest trends, I just need the web design to be 'good enough' to be credible. 2. I think that information is all on the front page, isn't it? I don't want to make the tag line too wordy. 3. The screenshot is Mac. But it says Windows and Mac further down. 4. I've kept the testimonials short, but bolding might be worth a try. 5. Pretty much the same 'about' page seems fine for my other 2 products. Also, no-one much goes to the 'about' page. One of the advantages of my product is that your data stays on your computer. 6. Fair comment, but I don't think they would be on my website if they we happy with just Excel!

frequentnapper 7y ago
the design looks modern and clear to me as well. I don't think that's the issue.
oulu2006 7y ago
Agree with the OP, the website needs a designers touch, it does look dated. The general standard of websites is so much higher these days, if it looks cramped and dated I don't linger. Testimonials are too long as well.
- hermitcrab 7y ago
  What would you consider some good examples of modern websites for desktop software? BTW You would probably also consider the design of https://www.perfecttableplan.com https://www.perfecttableplan.com dated. But that converts visitors to downloads just fine.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    I disagree with the other users I think it looks fine. I think the biggest differences is perfect table plan focuses on a very concrete idea that is easy to communicate and uses a paradigm people are familiar with (looking at a seating chart). I was able figure out what it did within 5 seconds of looking at the website. But data transformations are a fairly abstract concept. Most users I imagine don't think "I need to transform my data", they probably think of the problem more concretely like "I need to deduplicate this giant excel spreadsheet". They will be glancing at the website asking themselves the question "Will this deduplicate my giant excel spreadsheet?" and the first picture they see will be a dataflow diagram. The user has probably never seen a dataflow diagram, and only rarely will they have done in gui based programming before. They will probably think "This might deduplicate my giant excel spreadsheet after I learn a bunch of hard stuff about how to wire these different boxes together". Before ever realizing how easy your app is to use. If I were you, I'd replace data transformations with something like "Excel power tasks", and then have a list of all the tasks you can do, like deduplicate, concatenate, merge columns, etc. all with 15 second videos showing how easy your application makes accomplishing these tasks. So users lands on site, sees a list of the tasks they might want to accomplish, clicks it, watches 15 second video showing them how ridiculously easy your app makes performing that task. Btw the apps look really awesome.
    - 7y ago