One page sales site
I had a good discussion with a friend at NextSpace today about the importance of being succint (earnest?) when writing a business plan. I feel like the same brevity is really effective when designing websites that sell specialized software or digital assets.
Take, for example, a new site selling a line of Helvetica-inspired-icons (found via PagePlane.com’s blog post today). Neat product, but I find the site itself more interesting:
- one page
- everything you need to know about the product to make a quick decision
- simple and easily located purchase option
- clean design, no visual static
The site brands the product, describes its usefulness and then serves as the mode of distribution, in one clean sweep of HTML.
A similar example is NihongoUp, a small Flex-based Japanese-language tool sold on a one page site at http://nihongoup.com/. Once again, one page site, quick and concise.
One page sites probably aren’t the best thing for software or digital assets that involve more of a commitment from the user. It seems to me that more involved tools like the Flex-based UI mockup tool Balsamiq benefit from sites that support a community of users through seamless integration of blogs, forums, etc.
Side note for aspiring micro-ISV’s: Peldi Guilizzoni, Balsamiq’s creator, is a personal hero of mine, as he took a project from idea to completion, creating an exceptional product with an appreciative community in a relatively short period of time. He documented each step of the creation process in his blog — a written record that ostensibly gives potential customers a sense of confidence and connection, but in my case it’s a great how-to guide and a source of inspiration as I try to create a simple, clever tool for diagramming.
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October 11th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Thank you for mentioning http://nihongoup.com/!
Actually, I just (yesterday) launched a new redesigned version of the site which hopefully made it even more clean and usable