Virtualmin (a YC company) has a new website, feedback wanted | Hacker News Reader

Virtualmin (a YC company) has a new website, feedback wanted

virtualmin.com

9 pointsSwellJoe31 comments

Overall it's extremely nice. Some unfiltered random things that I thought:

+ So much text on the front page I didn't read any of it.

+ The favicon "fit into" the logo. Trivial, but pleasing.

+ The first thing I wanted to see after screenshots was the demo, but I only found that by scrolling to the bottom.

+ The demo seems to be on a slow machine or something because it's not very responsive and the UI graphics (rounded corner GIFs) loaded slowly (no keepalives?).

+ The quote "Your software kicks ass!" seems a little risque for your intended audience. It stood out to me at least.

+ "Docs" navigation option made me thing of Google Docs & Spreadsheets which through me off.

+ Navigation links are a bit non-standard and seem unimportant because of their size.

I finally have to accept that pg was right...I talk way too damned much, and everyone agrees. So the text is getting a serious pruning.

I'll make the demo more visible. The demo is, in fact, on a slow machine--it's a qemu instance on the server itself. I'm moving it to a much faster xen or EC2 this week sometime. It is now doing double duty as the Webmin demo server, so at any given time there are several people logged in. It's working pretty hard for such a wimpy system.

As for the quote being little risque, that's OK in my book. We're not the stodgy choice (that'd be cPanel), so the stodgy "nobody ever got fired for buying cPanel" folks won't buy what we're selling anyway. I think it's downright wonderful that a customer said it on a whim, so I couldn't help but take the opportunity to share it.

I've renamed Docs to Documentation.

I'll try bumping the nav links up a notch.

Thanks for the great tips staunch.

Clean look. Good fonts and colors. But way too much text. I'd guess you could (thus should) cut three quarters of the words on the page. Also, it's not clear enough that the screenshot is a screenshot: it looks like a form on the page.

I knew you'd say that (about the too much text). Everyone seems to agree, though. Somehow I still manage to talk too damned much.

Text is being pruned as we speak. I'll see what I can do about the screenshots.

I'm sure you are already doing this. But "The four best ways to manage your server

Virtualmin offers four methods for managing your server: Web, mobile device, command line, and remote API. Virtualmin is always available, no matter where you are or how you want to work."

can be...

Virtualmin is always available, no matter where you are. You can conveniently manage your servers through Web, mobile, command line and remote API.

I'd delete the entire paragraph following Try a live demo. Just replace it with a link saying live demo.

With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with a link and a play button on it here?

The little I know about writing I learned from "On writing well" - Zinsser. His chapter on simplicity is worth the price of the entire book.

"With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with a link and a play button on it here?"

That's a great idea. Why didn't I think of that?

I would make "Download/Buy Virtualmin" more prominent on the main page. In fact, I'd try to give it as much prominence as the "Find Out More" button.

At first, I was confused about whether this was a service or if it was shrink-wrap software for you to buy and install on your own servers. I suspected the latter, but didn't know for sure and was kind of frustrated that I couldn't tell. I clicked on the demo link and the "find out more" link before coming back to the main page and finding the "buy online" link down at the bottom.

Valid point. Whenever folks come to us through "web 2.0" focused channels there is the built-in assumption that it's a service. But, we want to help folks build services on their own servers. I'll spend a bit more effort on making the distinction clear, and making "download it now!" an obvious component (I'm in the midst of porting our automated installer from the commercial version to the Open Source version, so that'll make it easier...right now the GPL version is rather complicated to get spinning).

A few thoughts:

- too much text.

- it isn't immediately obvious to me what the differentiators are for your product vs. competition

- Brighten up the site. Your audience may be technical, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't like colour. Of course, these things are subjective.

- might want to make the screenshot even larger - or zoom into an interesting feature. Visuals break up the page and draw the eye.

+ the quote at the top is good

- you say 'the four best ways to manage your server' and then make the user search thru a paragraph of text to figure out what you mean. Call the 4 ways out with more emphasis..

- don't think you need the 'The New Virtualmin.com' section. It's like a sausage maker boasting about improvements to their factory... Perhaps you could make better use of that space by focusing on the product. - Use more visuals - perhaps to highlight the top 3 features of your product

There are more positives than I have mentioned but calling out what needs to be improved would probably be of more use to you.

Hey comatose,

Thanks for the pointers. All good advice, and I agree with most of it.

I won't comment on the too much text any further, since all YC newsies agree. I will cut text with reckless abandon.

I've rejiggered the "four ways" paragraph to put what those ways are in the first sentence.

I agree about more color...being weak on design limits my capacity to actually do so without making it look like angry fruit salad. I've forced myself to use a very limited palette of carefully selected colors to avoid that problem. But I'll see about getting some more accent colors in their. I do plan to add screenshots to the About/Find out more page.

As for the "new Virtualmin.com" part, I think we probably do need it for another few weeks. We had 4000+ registered users, and 500+ paying customers, on the old site, and I had to issue them new usernames and passwords (derived from the old...but the new policies prevent the old from working as they were). So, even though I sent them all email about the change, not everyone got that email, and might need some guidance on getting logged in with the new details. It will go away soon, though, to be replaced by a "news" section, probably.

Hrm. I didn't like the quote at the top myself. I thought it focused too much on the people making the thing, rather than something like "Thanks to Virtualmin, I can manage 31415926 servers in just 10 minutes a day!" or "Here at hornywetsluts dot com, virtualmin has been a blessing - it let us take our business to the next level"... Something customer focused, in short.

I'll point out the non-obvious fact that everyone is seeing a different quote, every time they load the page. So, the quote you didn't like is probably not the same one the parent did. ;-)

It's just nice things people have been telling us lately. The selection of quotes will grow over time.

I should probably grill you two to find out exactly which quotes you did and didn't like.

Aha, wasn't sure, should have quoted it. It was something to the effect of "I'm sure you already know this, but you rock".

Not to comment at all on your degree of 'rocking', just that as a quote it doesn't do too much for me:-)

I don't recall the exact wording anymore, but it was something about how your control panel interface is better than the competition.

Basically I like it, but it could be more user-friendly, communicating what you do with significantly less cognitive load.

Needs a tagline with the logo - tell me very quickly what it is you do. Could even use the intro sentence "[Virtualmin is] the world's most powerful and flexible webserver administration tool" as tagline.

You could then use the main textblock to make the the product's essential features bolder and simpler to grok; less paragraphy, more bullet-pointy.

I would also minimise the bottom bits into link+sentence and make them clearer/brighter. Sell the product in the main block: you don't need to sell the links to the demo/video with whole paragraphs, just present them clearly.

Off the main page, you need some whitespace at the bottom of the landing pages (buy & download). At the moment the footer is squashing the text.

Thanks dood. Excellent advice.

Everyone, pg included, agrees that I talk too much. So I'll definitely cut out some of the unnecessary exposition. Now that you mention it, it seems obvious that I don't need to tell people why they would want to see the demo or the introductory video. It really takes another pair of eyes to spot these kinds of things (maybe design gods can do it all for themselves, but I never would have figured it out for myself).

The screenshots need to NOT fly by. Put a link, "Next ScreenShot" at the top. I call this the "Forbes Magazine slideshow problem", because forbes does that to a ridiculous degree.

One thing: I've used products like this in the past, and really didn't like them. Yours certainly looks nicer, but the big problem is that most admins (most good admins) like to stay closer to the command line. So, a quick suggestion: When someone envokes this or that command by clicking around, stick it in a rolling log, clearly visible.

So, if I press "Start Tomcat", I see a little box that says:

/etc/init.d/tomcat5 start

...and if I press "Restart Machine" I see:

shutdown -9 now

...if you know what I'm saying. This will allow people to see precisely what's going on, and let them ditch the admin screen as needed and replicate the commands manually.

Hey mynameishere,

Thanks for the suggestions. I was kind of worried about the screenshots, myself. I'll add forward/back clickies.

Actually, we're pretty much with you on the "show people what's happening" train, though we don't always show the command being executed (it's often not actually commands, but processing of configuration files and such--restarting services is a tiny part of what we do), we do generally show the command line output of the commands we run. So, restarting a service does give you back the results from the initscript.

And to go further on that theme, my book (published by No Starch in '03 and now combined with Jamie's book from the Bruce Perens Open Source series and online for free at http://doxfer.com/Webmin) is pretty heavily focused on connecting up the GUI to the command line. We're not into hocus pocus and hiding the system from the user--our interest is in making it easier to get things done right fast.

I'll also mention that Virtualmin is based on Webmin, which is religious about being polite to command line editing of configuration files. You can twist your httpd.conf into a tiny little ball and toss it in a corner, and as long as the syntax is valid, Webmin will deal with it correctly. It respects comments, the order of the file, and won't overwrite your changes (except where it has been told to do so). It is a wholly different kind of product than Plesk or cPanel (which are pretty much all-or-nothing, and don't permit anyone else to touch the config files). Webmin's got over 300,000 lines of code to deal with all of that stuff correctly...nobody else even tries.

But, now I'm talking too much. ;-)

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Another problem with the rotating screenshots...I clicked on the small version to see it bigger and got a different screenshot.

Is that a problem? I kinda thought the variety was interesting. But, if it's disconcerting rather than exciting, I'll make it a bit more predictable. Shows what I know. ;-)

Anybody else find randomized screenshots on the front page (and then not matching the big version on the screenshots page) troublesome?

Problem was when I saw a screenshot with details that interested me, I clicked on it hoping to get a larger version. I did get a larger version, but it was a larger version of a different screenshot.

Not to kick a dead horse, but I agree with everyone that there's too much text. It isn't just a problem on the front page, but all across the site.

On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?

"On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?"

That's actually the same note. If you had the question when looking at the website, others will too. ;-)

I'm working on a new comparison chart (the old one was too wordy) to post to the website sometime soon.

Short answer:

We're mobile capable. Nearly everything in the browser UI degrades to a usable mobile accessible version

We're clean and polite to the underlying system. Sysadmins who've dealt with cPanel or Plesk on the command line will know how valuable this distinction is.

Comprehensive and easily scriptable command line and remote API.

Ruby on Rails and Gems support in the next release this weekend

PHP 4 and PHP 5 simultaneously with php.ini and PEAR modules management

mod_fcgid with suexec (rather than the old and rather clunky suphp)

spam/AV filtering per-user and per-domain

built-in WYSIWYG website builder

nice database GUIs for MySQL and PostgreSQL (I believe they are nicer than phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin, but if the user disagrees we also provide those)

70+ easily installable applications (compare to Fantastico at $199 extra), including SugarCRM and a few others that nobody else has the guts to touch because they're so damned complicated to install

comprehensive monitoring and alerts (also mobile capable)

optional Google Analytics (and Quantcast and MyBlogLog) injection into all pages, regardless of how they're served--static, PHP, Ruby, CGI, whatever

tiered pricing, so someone with a couple of domains doesn't have to spend $450

There's more, but I'm talking too much again...

Just a small point, but on Firefox on Linux the "Lost Password / Register " links don't render properly (unless you make the font really small). Makes the page look a bit messy.

Yeah, I noticed that, too. That was due to some other suggested changes. Should be fixed now in the style sheet.

Nope, still there for me :( Although it's broken in a different way now...

I see. If you've forced bigger fonts it pushes things around some. I'll have to work on that. A white-space: nowrap for that div makes the login form unbreakable, but it can break the rest of the page with fonts even two notches bigger than what I've specified. That's a problem (I force bigger fonts myself, quite often...).

Thanks for pointing it out.

Very cool! I did not get one part: are you the same team who makes webmin?

Yes. Jamie, my co-founder is the primary author of all 300,000+ lines of code in Webmin and the 90,000+ lines of code in Usermin. (I'm not entirely convinced he's human.)

Kudos to your cyber-cofounder :)

The question I was thinking was: Who exactly is this product for?

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