15th
Is your site's value proposition/concept easy to understand?
It bothers me when I go to a webpage and cant figure out what the product/site/concept/idea is within 1 minute of previewing the site. Thousands of sites a day are constantly fighting for my attention and, if I give a site my attention, I expect that they know how to capitalize on it. If they dont, a lot of time & money on site development was just wasted because tomorrow a whole new slew of sites will start fighting for my attention.
Today’s example is Fire Eagle, a new location based service from yahoo. Maybe I’m not that smart, but I really couldnt figure out within a minute what the site does and why it is valuable to me. Being the tech geek that I am, I spent more time than I should have trying to figure out what the site is about by clicking to their blog and reading the help section. The blog had a video explaining the idea that was painful to watch. The help section was ok. Finally I just said fuck it and I signed up for the site. I put in my location, went to the applications list and saw that there isnt one application that I use regularly in the list. So I hid my location and basically wrote off using the service for the immediate future.
How many people will really give a confusing service that much attention? I can only guess that its the extreme minority. My advice is to ask friends/families/mentors to tell you if they understand within a minute what your site does. Do this before you launch your site. The time/effort will be well worth it.
