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Comment by pseudolus | Hacker News Reader

I had to look up your profile and I'm assuming your site is https://propertywebbuilder.com. It looks good but kind of bland in that I can't recall ever having visited a real estate web site that doesn't feature some actual photos of homes. Additionally, you don't appear to have any links to sample pages that incorporate your product.

edit: I noticed that at the very bottom there's a link to a demo but the demo doesn't load.

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Damn, I didn't think this post would get so popular. I actually forgot to update my profile here. My current project is https://propertysquares.com :(

I'm viewing this on an atypical mobile screen, so it's possible my user experience is a long way from the default, but I think the problem here might be less "uncanny valley" and more it being busy with conflicting and confusing user action options. Perhaps before you had something very simple?

The images are fine and there's not much more to the design on mobile. But at the top I'm told "you previously created a home hunt" which I definitely didn't which links to a form with prefilled demo passwords which is unusual, the main call to action is below the fold, and I'm not sure how important the link to donate to the project via OpenCollective is, but I bet the average first time user is confused by it. The other effect I can imagine is if the first cohort of viewers was the sort of people that browse interesting FOSS projects (who will have used a lot of software with worse landing pages!) and the cohort looking at the current design are homebuyers in general...

They both look like every other landing page i've seen in the past 5 years. Maybe too much polish makes them all look the same?

Some quick comments:

- Add more whitespace. Sections are too close to each other

- Reduce font size. The body text is way too large and competes with headers

- Add padding. It would help to have some whitespace on the left and right of your page.

If I'm honest, the block height for many elements seems a little off. We're used to individual sections occupying the entire screen, but on this site, sections feel like they're bleeding into each other.

Some of the internal elements also seem too squat and compressed, especially the "what makes our websites special" part

Yeah, as a form of friendly feedback, there's something vaguely untrustworthy-looking about the website, like a malware site. Actually as I think about it, there is an uncanny valley phenomenon to me, but in a malware site sense.

To me it has something to do with the typeface choices, and/or the text layout. My eye drifts to the text in the upper left quadrant.

Lack of actual photos is maybe another thing but for me personally there's more to it than that.

Yeah, I didn't do a good job with the propertywebbuilder landing page. With propertysquares I paid a lot less attention to the landing page and found I was getting much better engagement!

Just as some constructive feedback, perhaps you can try a different color palette. On PropertySquares as well, the green, purple, and blue don't seem to mesh well together.

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