Hacker News Reader

Cut text; reduce choices; only offer one CTA button.

It's fascinating how an Occam's Razor-type force pervades successful web design.

As always, test. I'm broadly supportive of this advice, but I know people who do long-form copy and see conversion rates slip when they switch to short form, and (while it isn't long-form) the BCC home page historically performs better with lots of text than with little.

Yes, one example of those kinds of pages are the never ending sales pitch pages (e.g. selling parrot training). So, text _per se_ is not a bad thing on a page. But you have to provide proper flow and layout to generate interest and then seduce visitor to that prominent 'Add to Cart' button.

That was my initial impression too (what about SEO?). It's about balancing the text with the layout and clear calls to action.

When people have only one thing to process mentally and click on, guess what? They click it.

In an extreme example[1], when a service failure resulted in a mobile app displaying only ads (no content) -- revenue soared.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1753134

Reply on news.ycombinator.com