Web Excursions 2021-05-14
What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months
The 9 most common (and easily fixed) things that founders miss
Focus your landing page on one conversion goal.
Contrast your product with competitors and the current way of doing things.
Move your social proof up the page, make sure it's concise, compounds your copy, and from a buyer relevant to the visitor.
Avoid technical terms and acronyms, and write in plain language. Remember you're talking to a human, even if they are a B2B buyer. Ask yourself if a 12 year old could understand your landing page.
Agitate your visitor by painting a vivid picture of the pain using emotional language, stories and visuals.
Visitors shouldn't have to work out how and why the product will benefit them. Tell and show them with clear benefits language, and example use cases.
add context to your CTA so the visitor knows what to expect.sign up to GetSiteControl and add an exit intent survey on your landing page. Asking why they're leaving. Address those reasons on your page.
setup analytics and events tracking. Uncover a conversion baseline for future experimentation.
7 (slightly more) advanced ideas for better performing landing pages
Landing pages targeting multiple personas and use cases almost universally convert at a lower rate. Go more niche, expand later
Write a list of what a visitor needs to know before they will sign up. Make sure this critical info is before your first CTA.
Show, don't tell.
Understand and address doubt through user testing, exit intent, or surveys.
Work harder to find or create meaningful images for your landing page.
Setup funnels in Google Analytics or other tools so you can review drop off throughout the funnel, not just on your landing page.
A cycle of constant experimentation increases your learnings about customers and drives more revenue. Keep shipping tests!
Notion API – public beta
TechBro8615: In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database.
If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship,
I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack.
cristinacordova [Notion employee]: We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliability-89f937a6ccc04905b1dcfa878537e08d). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally.
April 19, 2021 — Update on database sharding: On Friday 5PM PDT, Notion scheduled a small maintenance window to move from a single database instance to a sharded deployment in order to increase reliability and scalability. The maintenance went as planned and Notion is now capable of serving 3x as much traffic as before, with increased flexibility to expand further as needed.
2462: NASA Award
This comic jabs at poorly-supported claims of discovering alien life, particularly when instances of pareidolia are used as "evidence" of such life.
空想性错视: 空想性错视(英语:Pareidolia),也被称为空想性错觉、幻想性错觉,是一种心理现象,指的是大脑对外界的刺激(一副画面或一段声音)赋予一个实际的意义,但只是巧合,实际上“意义”并不存在。
What It Was Like to Sell Apps Online in 2003
Brent Simmons: We used a service called Kagi for the storefront and credit card processing. Kagi had been around since the ’90s, and it was well-known and trusted by the Mac community.
Peter N Lewis: I was Kagi’s first customer and started with them in 1995, and continue doing the same to this day (other than switching to FastSpring in 2010).
Craig Hockenberry: Kagi was responsible for the beginning of the Iconfactory’s software business.
Kagi Shuts Down After Falling Prey to Fraud - TidBITS (2016)
The news was as sad as it was unexpected. Kagi, one of the earliest digital commerce companies and long a favorite of many Mac shareware developers, has shut down as of 31 July 2016, just shy of 22 years in business.