Have you tried having a 15 minute Skype conversation with your 10 most passionate users? They can tell you loads about what they love/hate. You'll get some good clues about how to find more people like them and convince them to share it with others.
Dude, the intellectual level of the content on "listnerd" appears to be about 11 years old. I couldn't give a crap about any of that and I tried.
How about having an "old folks" section with lists about vitamins, exercises, home improvement tips and plots of long-forgotten stories that deal with emotional complexities...
...You know, stuff people with functioning brain lobes like.
Your mobile interface is good - needs a tiny bit of polish around things like the vote counts being cut off on the "list of lists" view. Your featured lists suck. Greatest presidents? What's the utility, other than "oh look"?
Find a niche and cram yourself in there, saturate it, then look at other verticals. Right now you're putting the onus on the user to find a use for your service. Don't make them think. Give them a use.
Given the extant decent mobile interface, and the general clumsiness/info-overload of the ilk of trip advisor, sculpting for travel lists might be a good niche to push into - best places to eat, stay, see, etc. Cheap to experiment with this and other verticals.
Anyway, that's my $0.02, and fwiw I've steered several startups (from a dev/consult for equity corner) to successful exits - just not my own!
First of all - when people visit a new site for the first time and see familiar stuff, instead of new and exciting stuff, they tend to leave before they even dig deeper on the site.
The design is fine, the layout is difficult - you should use rectangles of different sizes and backgrounds to make it easier for the visitor to focus on content that are more important, new or viral.
What is dangerous about the assumption that the most popular things are the most written about, are that you ignore new things that MIGHT get traction, what you'd need is a time-machine - list things before they get HOT HOT HOT! So that people who visit the site have a larger reason to do so.
And think about what kind of users you want, the middle-aged people that love lists? Or the lazy teenager who love trends but feel that lists are for shores.
It seems like you have technical people on your team; so if you are not counting your time why is the number so high?
Even with design and team of two-three engineers consulting for a month or two that figure is extremely high.
I am a Developer and I noticed a few really concerning things in your CSS:
1. I believe you're committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: "#site-header.newheader nav>ul>li>a.buttonGreen"
That CSS Selector should not exist like that. You shouldn't be using ids (first) and second this should be be: .buttonGreen {}
It looks like bad Sass or LESS is being used and nesting is being abused. If you'd like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.
The reason these selectors are a problem is because of the extremely long paint time. Right now your site takes around 30ms to paint. It should be closer to 10ms.
2. The CSS classes used are meaningless. Above there's a "buttonGreen" class. However, what if you redesign and that button is now blue? Do you just edit the CSS (like should have to be done) Or do you change your HTML and CSS to reflect a basic styling change? This only hurts you and maintaining your site.
3. You're loading 2.4 MB of data on your home page. 1 MB of that is images, which is fine, but that means you have 1.3 MB of data loading. The good news is that on mobile almost 100% of what you are loading are images, however, that number is still 2 megabytes. I'd see if there is a way to lower that number.
4. It is extremely busy. I was really confused when I got to the site. I am not a good designer so I cannot give specific advice, but I'd think "calming" the site would help a lot.
5. On Chrome Mobile I cannot click the hamburger button. It does nothing.
6. You need to simplify your creation flow. You have 4 pages right now, it should only be 1.
7. Your select boxes need a dropdown arrow.
8. USE NATIVE SELECTS and restyle them using CSS. Use a fallback for IE and IE only!
9. Mobile functionality is not the same as desktop functionality, this is a big one that needs to be fixed. You should be able to do the EXACT same things on mobile that you can on desktop.
10. The goal of the site should not be browsing, I don't think. I think it should be about: Creating lists and sharing lists. Browsing should certainly be an option, but make creation and sharing more prominent than browsing.
I didn't know this was an issue until recently and now I'm slowly fixing it on my main project. I'd love your additional advice/pointers!
The "getting started button" and "buy button" are both interaction buttons. (Similar buttons, but one is green and the other is yellow).
In Sass you represent that this way: 1. Placeholder %interaction-button class where you outline the fact that it has a border radius, color, and any other shared styling. 2. A button maker mixin where you put the colors that need to be changed, and any other flags (like has_sub_text: true for the unbold text) and then @extend's the placeholder above. 3. The classes ".buy-button {}" which include the mixin you made.
1) Don't use tag names in css
div.something should be .something
3) Isolate elements into logical components and name part of those components in the css.
<button class='button button-primary'><span class='button--icon-search'></span></button>thank you very much for your answer. You put a lot of effort into it, so I wanted to reply in the same manner :)
The CSS stuff was done by Jesper, one of the founders, that unfortunately left the company. I'll tell him about the CSS issues you address.
As for issues 3-10, I'm noting down all of them in our todo list and I'll address them individually. Thank you for great input! :)
Best of luck to you guys.
Normally I would follow "if you don't have anything nice to say" but since you literally asked for it:
Your site tries to build a better mousetrap in one of the worst corners of the internet (better means 'worse' in this case). "List sharing" is a known cheap trick for internet marketers who are the bottom of the barrel, exploitative of both original content creators and those prone to being sucked in to mindless content (aka internet junk food).
Maddox has a memorable rant that sums it up better than I can: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks
Your site is not unlike the "reply girls" cancer that devalued youtube, or the fake thumbnails showing cleavage on related videos for everything.
Why would you want to "revolutionize the world of lists"? This doesn't even make sense.
I'd be happy to see a revolution in data lists. There are all sorts of occasions I'm looking for the top X in list format and would love to run across it as the top result, in a clean format that loads fast. One site that had a million of those (that are accurate) would earn my bookmark.
I suppose Wolfram Alpha does some of this well.
Basically, desaturated the two header colors a lot (still not perfect, but at least maybe it gives some contrast. I also ripped out the orange buttons and the redundant search box because they were garish and really hard to read. I also tweaked the fonts a little bit.
(Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer, these are just ideas so you can at least see what it would look like in an alternate universe).
If this were a legit post, I would say this:
I think this is a relatively crowded niche you're in. I'm also sure that you dramatically overspent if you actually spent $200K getting this developed. But it appears that your developers did what you asked them to do...."make me a functional site that does X". So if the end result "sucks" to you (99.9% of your users don't know or care about CSS and other issues mentioned in these comments), then there is only one person to blame.
1. The colors. Ugh.
2. The formatting of the content boxes should be more consistent. All pictures should go to the edge and have the same height. Logos should have padding, not stretch to the edge (e.g. YouTube). Even once this is fixed, the different palettes in the different pictures are what's contributing to the clutter. Maybe make all the pictures b&w... not sure. Do you need the chrome for these? Boxes with shading and extra lines is a bit dated. Check out digg.com for a better example of this style. Generally this is the biggest issue.
3. The "Popular Lists" graphic should be half/half on the area above/below. Right now, just a few pixels lay on the green area. Plus the white is too close to the off-white of the section below. If not for the shadow, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you were going for.
4. Something looks odd about the font in Chrome. Certain letters seem bold, or somehow "stretched" a few pixels too tall. (e.g. The "E" from E3, the "B" from Best Viral Videos)
5. The anti-aliasing is inconsistent. Text isn't being anti-aliased at all. The logo is anti-aliasing unnecessarily (at the top/bottom of squared letters). The pictures seem to be low-quality JPEGs which contributes to this issue.
Assuming all the formatting is done via css a good designer should be able to fix most of this in a few days.
You have what looks like a serviceable site to produce lists (not really a complex challenge). I'm not sure why you think your site sucks? I'm sure you'll get some feedback on styling, content etc (it's not really to my taste, but hey, it's not terrible either), but if you are seeing slow growth, it's probably not because your site tech/design sucks, it's because no-one really deeply wants to make lists in the first place. The idea and marketing is the problem, not the execution.
So, who is the site for, what's the target market/demographic? Who are they making the lists for?
Perhaps instead of targeting everyone, you should narrow your focus, and start targeting a particular market. This sort of site needs either a very specific focus to which the list making and content are tailored - say shopping lists, or it needs a specific demographic.
If you want to make this a social site, perhaps target a demographic like Norwegian teens OR mums if you have experience there, but don't target the entire world from the start.
If you want to make money from shopping, maybe tailor this to just best of lists of products for particular niches and invest in content?
As it is I don't see how lists about These 7 Things Will Make Any Man Want to Fight for You and Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8 are going to keep anyone on your site. The content just isn't compelling at all (there are hundreds of existing content farms churning out stuff like this like buzzfeed etc) and it is far too scattershot.
PS Install some caching software prior to posting on HN :)
www.listnerd.com/lists?letter=</script><script>alert(document.cookie);</script>
I like the idea of making lists because it speaks to my passion for process. I want to be able to bookmark lists as well as monetize and own my content. If I can run my own ads on the site, then I'm less scared of creating original content through that venue. Your terms of use sucks and is not favorable.
It strikes me as an evolved incarnation of Buzzfeed[2] in that the entirety of its content is user-generated, whereas this wasn't the case with Buzzfeed until recently, and even now, I believe user submissions are subject to moderation.
I don't think you should give up yet. I wouldn't. I would start by simplifying the design (sure, it looks nice, but it feels over-ornamented), defining stricter guidelines for posting (e.g. encourage "Top/Best X" type posts in lieu of general free-form lists, and figure out other ways to start driving traffic to it.
I wish you guys the very best and again, don't give up yet.
PS: Please get in touch if you'd like to talk more.
[1] http://marketingstartups.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-listn... [2] http://buzzfeed.com
That's exactly what we're trying to make; a kind of Buzzfeed 2.0, where the "2.0" stands for improved functionality and quality of lists. That's our vision anyway.
I saw your site, looks very cool. Perhaps I could mail you our story?
EDIT after reading more comments: looks like I did miss a lot of complexity. Still, it's hard to believe all that stuff was necessary. Need more content? Pay some schmuck $7/hr to make content (or outsource on Mechanical Turk, etc). Or stay extra-lean and do it yourself. Admin area? Probably don't need something terribly advanced. Caching? Not unless you're getting a ton of traffic, which it doesn't sound like you are. Wordpress integration? Doesn't sound terribly useful or relevant, but I could be wrong given that I don't know the target market (if there is one?) very well. Maybe you had tens of support emails a day asking for it - but I doubt it.
Your biggest problem is that you have 4 people listed on your team page yet there are two with the title 'Project Manager'. From what I can tell from playing with the site, it just lets you build 'top 10' style lists and allows people to vote/comment on them. Frankly, this is a weekend project for a good developer or for a better outcome, a good developer/designer pair. What exactly are the project managers doing?
Perhaps interestingly, my first click was to Browse Top Lists, only to find that Porn Actresses, Page 3 Models and Hentai artists all feature in the top 5 and 4/9 trending lists have the same pink handbag image, even for the Best Web Apps list. You need an adult category which you can hide the NSFW lists in and then not display this to logged out users. As already noted, I think the content is your biggest problem; I may not be your target audience but regardless there's little there to be encouraged to comment on or find inspiration from for new lists.
Sigh. There. That's your criticism. Shameful.
Honest question.
The homepage fails HTML validation. 32 Errors, 7 warnings
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd....
Homepage isn't being cached (intended?, in fact you have quite a few elements that have no caching set. Run PageSpeed Insights perhaps?
Login Overlay - can't escape to close.
Seems I can create a list without signing up? At least, that's what the button click seems to indicate (I didn't go through the entire process).
None of the "Create a List, Share It, See It" images actually do anything.
Doing a Search on "Select *" resulted in your following page taking 12.06 seconds to process before returning No results found. Searching for "Random" took 10.24 seconds. You have a major bottleneck in your search system.
The blog takes you to a totally different layout. This is jarring.
Homepage returns quickly, but the "Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8" took twice as long to return. If I had to guess, you are fully rebuilding the page each load? If that's true, did you scale that out against the database?
The trending lists block on the bottom of each list page is much larger then the content beside it, consider including fewer items in the list.
I thought Listnerd sounded familiar. You helped me out with SEO last year with your Offer HN, so I'll try to give some useful advice back. Sorry to hear that Listnerd is struggling.
Listnerd doesn't really grab my attention upon first visit. Maybe I'm not the target market but upon opening it up I'm not interested in making a list. Making a list sounds like work. Why should I spend part of my weekend doing work on some random site? I think you haven't demonstrated a value to your visitors.
It also seems to bland to me. It doesn't really differentiate itself from the more established list sites like BuzzFeed. Why should I read ListNerd over BuzzFeed or Reddit? What features, angle, or value does ListNerd bring to the table that those sites do not?
Some nitpicks: You should update your copyright in the footer to 2014, and the gold/yellow color on some buttons doesn't seem to match the rest of the color scheme.
Positives: I like the name. I like the create list process from a ui and design perspective.
Edit: I like the video on the homepage but it is hidden away. Make it more prominent.
By which I mean that the base, bottom-feeding type lists are already supremely well-covered by every other slideshow/listicle media property (Buzzfeed, the "suggested" stories at the bottom of every news site), so it would probably be difficult to attract any meaningful marketshare.
Whereas the curated lists of items, or recommendations are all things I'd use Pinterest for. Being able to organize and customize the item information seems like it could be a competitive advantage for you (Basically on Pinterest, your options are: Make a board, put pins on it, maybe comment on the individual pins; there's no sense of "ranking").
And it sounds like you're sort of looking at Pinterest's revenue model, but their user growth is kind of crazy, so they might end up sucking up all the air of that particular vertical.
In general it looks nice, I agree with most of what other people are saying so I won't elaborate too much.
1. affiliate revenue from product sales, tracked via Viglinks.com (usually 6% commision off one sale; and remember, our lists are basicly shopping guides - or well, they should be)
2. straight up advertising, Google Adsense to begin, then setting up our own sales team (if we succeed, that is)...
Also, what is a "SOE list"?
In terms of your actual site, the focus seems to be less on the content itself and more on sharing/commenting on things, almost trying to force people to interact with the site. Not a huge fan of the content on there right now either - a lot of it is quite trivial Buzzfeed-esque. This isn't inherently 'bad', but it's just that there are plenty of sites where you can find that kind of content.
The biggest problem I see is that you have no HTTPS support for this site. There are very good reasons for having HTTPS even if you aren't transmitting something you would consider "secret". With modern 64-bit processors and session caching, there's really no excuse for not having HTTPS available on every page. That said, you don't even have HTTPS support during login, which means that password information will be completely sniffable. It's not at all clear from the login popup that this will be the case.
Additionally, the actually design degrades nicely with Javascript turned off, which is commendable, but logging in/signing up is still Javascript-only. Ideally you'd want a site that keeps all the functionality that it can have without Javascript with Javascript enabled. It might look slick for people using Javascript, but you really don't need an in-tab popup for login/signup.
A. Why would people post their own lists to your site? What benefit do they have for doing this? No karma, raffle for free...gas or video games, nothing.
B. 4 long steps to create a list? Ok, fair enough. . . but I guess that brings me back to A.
C. You don't provide anything different or beneficial than the current top 'list' sites like pinterest and reddit provide. I think you provide less.
I didn't realise until reading comments here about clicking the "make list" button; then when I went back and looked I realised I was scrolled to the bottom on page entry. Bizarre, never seen that before, presumably a bug.
[FF30.0 on Ubuntu]
Now looking at the main page I'm trying to click on the big "create a list" element ... but no the button is at the top of the page, you need an arrow pointing to the button and/or to activate the "create a list" element IMO.
Anyhow I wonder how you came into pouring 200k into this idea (or maybe this is a catch number to get HN attention). Did you do any sort of validation prior to that? FYI I'd built this whole site for 5% of that budget
2. The 3-panel header interferes with swipe gestures for page navigation, like, a lot. Try not to break common interactions like that.