Project homepages that don't suck

If you missed my talk on project websites at Fosdem, you can check out the recording here.

I was really excited to do this talk, because homepages are the most concrete and most publicly visible representation of a project’s positioning. Writing a decent homepage is impossible if your positioning sucks. (This does not mean that all crappy homepages are due to terrible positioning… it is possible to have great positioning and still be incapable of translating it into a homepage, but that is a copywriting problem).

The focus of the talk was on homepages, which are the most important page on any website, with a little discussion of about pages, which are the second most important page on a website. The goal of a homepage is to help people decide whether or not it is worth their time to invest an additional 5 minutes in evaluating your project. If you help people understand immediately that your project is not right for them, that’s a win, assuming that your project is in fact not a good fit. You want to help people make the right decision about whether or not the project is a good fit as quickly as possible.

This is why homepage bounce rates are not a good indicator of project-market fit or really anything else. You want a certain number of people to bounce off your site.

Anyway, if you want more info about how I see positioning translated into a homepage, watch the video!