Ugh. Your product homepage should NOT be blog driven.
I love Otherinbox. I think it’s a great tool to manage the email overload we’re subject to in this web-world of ours. But, getting my friends and family to check it out is impossible.
Why? Because they hit otherinbox.com upon my recommendation and they’ll look at and it and say “WTF am I looking at?” (exaggeration mine). So then it’s up to me to explain to them what it is, how it’s set up, why they need it. I realize after doing this a few times that it’s not up to me to explain other people’s products. That’s what a freaking homepage is supposed to do.
My advice: if you’re building a product homepage, you better have a 1-liner that makes people “get it”, because the one thing we’re short on in this information overloaded world is attention. (This is the same advice for sales pitches, VC pitches, whatever.) Your homepage is an elevator pitch. Heck, I’ve been elevators that move a lot slower than people skimming through product homepages.
The very opposite of that is a blog-driven product homepage. Blogs are for articles, news items, random-thoughts, not for product explanations. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see a homepage like that, I wonder why people are too lazy to make a good homepage.
I’ll give Otherinbox the benefit of the doubt and pretend that because they’re in private beta, they want to turn people away… (yeah, right).
Also, if someone from Otherinbox happens to run across this blog entry - change your favicon, please. It’s still running the Typepad default.
