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Can you understand what this website is in less than 5 seconds?

Thomas Hansen on March 28, 2022

Howdy, I would appreciate some help, more specifically if I am able to "get the USP across" and if our website is understandable in less than 5 sec...
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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

Yes, 5 seconds is enough to get the main info.

On my opinion there's missing information on why someone should spend more time on your site. Yep, CRUD generator, okay, but who is your target audience, why they should dig into your web-site pages, what they should look for, etc etc?

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

BTW, did you see any reasons to spend more time there, as in did you understand the need the thing implemented a solution for? Or is it "in general" you suspect the need is not communicated good enough ...?

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

For sure, I may be wrong, but I think the page should provide easy to find answers to the following questions:

  1. Who is the target audience?
  2. What particular problem does your product solve?
  3. How does your product solve the problem and what's special about your product, that makes it different from other products of this kind?
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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Number 2 and number 3 I agree 100% with you in regards to that we could be much better at communicating. As to number 3 I really don't know to be honest with you. I started this thing as the open source tool I needed myself in my job, to simplify my own job. Then I was given the opportunity to create a company out of it. So the things wasn't created from hefty amounts of market research or anything like that. It was created to scratch my own itch. So my (exact) target audience is a little bit of a "research thing" I'm currently actually trying to figure out myself. I would suspect one or more of the following ...

  1. Software developer needing rapid CRUD wrapping his existing database
  2. DB sys-admin needing access to database from "whatever" device
  3. Non-technical PM or other "border-line developer" resource wanting to do some "semi-development"
  4. Etc, etc, etc ...
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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov • Edited

I would add the following sections on your web-site:

If you are a software developer, click here ==> And open the page that describes your product in software developer's language to "sell" it to him/her.

If you are a DBA/Sys-Admin/DevOps click here ==> The same approach in describing product for DBA/DevOps.

If you are a non-technical manager, PM, click here ===> And here describe the product in non-technical terms, to show how does this product help to reduce costs, raise revenue, etc etc.

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

That is a brilliant solution actually. I've already been thinking about creating different landing pages for the 3/5 primary "roles" I can imagine would want to use this, where I explain how it covers their particular needs, with some example use cases. However, it didn't occur to me I could "lead" these roles into these sections from the primary landing page before you said it (sound of me feeling stupid ... :/). Thank you :)

Commenting on your other comment here BTW.

I think amount of github stars do not solve this task

The purpose of that thing is to communicate that the thing is open source. It's kind of a "head fake", where the secondary message (GitHub/Open Source) is more important than the number of stars. Plus of course implicitly encouraging visitors to star the project, leading to higher ranking, etc ...

... but I definitely see your point :/

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

I would state it directly, that the product is open source and is being widely used currently. Because Github (with all due respect) and Github stats are not self-explanatory thing for many of your web-site visitors.

If it is possible I would collect reviews and post these reviews (from developers, devops and non technical managers) on the pages, dedicated for the relevant roles to make the product more appealing for the target audience.

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

I would state it directly, that the product is open source and is being widely used currently

It is a part of the header in the second section, below the fold. But if you didn't see that before I told you, there is something wrong with our communication ... :/

BTW, check the screenshot. Is this a better "primary message". Another commenter here said this was the best sentence that explained things the best ...

Screenshot

Notice the new text saying "Wrap your database in a CRUD API in seconds" - I suspect it's a better primary message ...

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

At the first glance it was not clear for me what problem does this product solve? It is a code generator? Okay, but why should we use it? I would like to find this information on the page. And then - what makes this product special from the customer's point of view. I think amount of github stars do not solve this task, sorry.

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Hmm, interesting. Suggestions? Others here have said the images don't do anything for them, I've been playing with the idea of an image describing "database + magic == API" in my head. Something graphical obviously. Would that help ...?

At which point I assume those with a database needing to have an API wrapping it would see the need ...?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I'd say I got the gist within a few seconds. My eyes went to the main text pretty quickly and it basically got the point across.

The screenshots do not provide any additional help, so a graphic which helped tie things together might aid me in getting to the selling proposition a bit faster.

There are a lot of different re-phrasings of some of the value prop throughout the page, and I do like this one in particular:

Wrap your existing database in a CRUD API in seconds

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Thx Ben, do you think the text is repeating itself too often? Or is it OK? I suspect the one you liked the most is the version that is the most concise and clear ...

... maybe I should try to avoid repetition as much? Thoughts ...?

We've got more things to play upon, but I didn't want to confuse with "too many USPs" initially ...

We tried to keep it to 3 main things, and then "sprinkle" some more further down below the fold ...

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Mike Talbot ⭐ • Edited

I like the value prop in general and got the top level of it within 5s, would probably like to understand more about it (like ability to handle relational joins, parent/child etc). I'm not sure I felt that the value proposition was unique and differentiated from other DB wrappers; I'm not saying it isn't.

It seems the product is or was called "Magic" but that isn't really obvious until you read down the page and at first I thought it was just a term rather than a brand. Either change it everywhere or call it Magic above the fold.

I agree with Ben, the pictures of computers and code don't work for me, they make it feel more complicated and don't add value.

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Thank you, we could go deeper into the details I suppose, such as joins, filtering, paging, sorting, etc (it supports all of these BTW) - Great suggestion. Thank you :)

The product started as only "Magic", then it became larger in scope and we added "cloud" - However, there's a Finish company using that name already, so to create a unique name we had to use "Aista Magic Cloud" where Aista is the company name. Which is similar to how for instance "Microsoft Office" brands itself (and others) - Adding the company name in front of some word or combination of words that are impossible to trademark, and/or have alone ...

The idea is that it's a "cloud system" doing "magic" and it's created by "aista" ...

I agree with Ben, the pictures of computers and code don't work for me, they make it feel more complicated and don't add value

Hmm ... :/

Thx ^_^

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Psst, I added some of the most sought after features thx to your feedback :)

Screenshot

At least it gives a short list of things to expect ...

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k_penguin_sato profile image
K-Sato • Edited

I think you guys are doing an excellent job explaining what it is in a very concise manner.

However, IMHO I thought the website took quite a while to load. As a matter of fact, the performance metric was not exactly high when I tested the site using lighthouse.
That being said, it is definitely not a deal-breaker or anything(I'm probably being too picky here). Just thought it could be a lot faster since it seems like a simple static site.

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Thomas Hansen

However, IMHO I thought the website took quite a while to load

Thank to you giving me a little bit of a "kick" the site loads twice as fast now. Thank you :)

(GZipping all content on the server)

We're still working on making it faster, but at least now it's not "extremely painfully" slow ...

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polterguy profile image
Thomas Hansen

Thx K-Sato, we're painfully aware of it. We wanted something we had 100% perfectly control over, that was super "rich", allowing us to easily create "complex code", so we chose Angular, thinking "SSR would solve everything for us". However, as we started turning on SSR, we found several problems. One of these being performance, since the site becomes very large. Another being caching, which seems to be way too aggressive, making it almost impossible to have users see different content than whatever they saw at the site the first time. But we'll probably figure both of these issues out as we proceed. The site is very new and was just published a couple of days ago, and we're constantly improving on it :)

The site is slow, and we're working on it, and we'll probably be able to optimise it at least much more than the speed it's currently having ...

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Thomas Hansen

Thx Leonid, yes for some reasons the play button flashes up blue on my iPhone too. Not sure why, it doesn't do that on my desktop. It is supposed to be "highly visible", but I agree with you in that it's a bit "too visible". Thank you for the feedback :)

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Codex

I would really love to have focus on scroll to next section in home page.

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Arnaud Dagnelies

Nope. I rarely saw a page taking more than 5 seconds to load...

Devtools

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Thomas Hansen

Interestingly, it consistently loads in 3 seconds on my laptop now, and I just tested it on my phone (5G), both with an empty cache, and it loads in 5 seconds on my phone, and 3 seconds in incognito mode on my laptop. Did you turn on throttling in dev tools ...?