Ask IH: Feedback on my Landing Page & Headless CMS

Hey @Christilut,

I am actually in the market for a headless CMS.

I have research the market and I am familiar with headless CMS', static websites and I am a software engineer by trade and I still struggled to understand what your product does.

I would consider looking at your competitors messaging and seeing how they convey their message. Is the fact that it's static actually relevant to the customer? You could just talk about the benefits (fast, stable etc) and then explain how it's fast and stable (static websites) lower down in the page :)

Best of luck and let me know if you would like to talk more about this?

Hey, Christilut!

Mostly I'm worried that my explanation is not clear enough and that users that are unfamiliar with static websites are not sure what to do here

When I first read your page, I didn't 'get' what your product is, and I'm probably your ideal reader - I'm a developer AND I've even written a static site generator of my own.

Your landing page is a bunch of features and it requires a lot of effort from the reader to translate those features into reasons to buy/try Headless.

You need to do that work for the reader and tell them exactly how Headless will make their life better. So for example, be explicit about why internationalization is great and how this will generate more page views and better organic rankings (both motivations of website owners).

Also, I am a bit confused about your talk of CDNs. Do you host the content on CDNs? I get the impression that you don't and this is up to the user to sort out themselves?

You should also submit your product here: https://headlesscms.org/

I'm also in the market for a headless CMS to drive a handful of sites. Everything is understood re features and pricing. I've signed up for a beta account. Looking forward to testing it out.

A big differentiator in other services is the API request limit. You don't specify this in your pricing, you only talk about transfer limits - and then you only we're unlikely to hit any limits anyway.

Contentful has probably the most generous API request limit for a free plan - 1M/month - but this comes with the requirement of adding their 'Powered by Contentful' logo in your footer.

I don't like the Features page. I'd rather see the features laid out in a traditional long-form page so I can scan up and down easily. You'll get more milage out of the lovely icons if they're all visible at the same time too.

i built a music service as a static site on s3, because i did not want to manage server(s) or instances for http or db. moreover, i did not want to fret over scalability for the occasional/unlikely traffic spike. since i am "static" i get 0-to-highTraffic for low cost. in your case, it sounds to me that you are in the business of providing SaaS blog platform CMS+hosting; your advantage is the low cost and high performance; and your "secret" to providing such a high performance for the low price, is that your backend uses the "static" ("serverless") architectural pattern. maybe you can just advertise such price-performance, and only talk about static if/when the clients ask about the "secret sauce" (some will ask to make sure that they are not being "conned")

Hi @Christilut,

Would be really interested in the technology and build process behind how the system works. Are you building a similar process as services like Forestry.io Cloudcannon Siteleaf?

HI Chris,

I just checked the link to your site without reading any of the discussion here so that I got close to a "you should check this cool service out" referral as I could. My initial impression was really good. Clear headline and opening sentence and professional 'feel'. However, I think the order of the sections on your homepage is a bit confusing.

Having immediately understood that you offer static website CMS, it feels more logical to re-jig the follow-on flow to say:

• why static websites are great
• then, why managing them 'headless' is a great idea
• now I'm sold, tell me I can get started for free

Other nit-picky comments:

• the stuff about loving developers seems a bit 'meh'. Perhaps a shift of emphasis to a "we know your users are real people so our editor's really easy to use" type of message would be better?
• the intercom-style box that pops up has your name at the top and then a "we blah-blah"...go personal or 'corporate'.

I think it's a great idea though and the amount of work you've put in clearly shows. I really hope you're successful.

Good luck,
James

Love the icons on your landing page. Are they custom, or an Iconset?

Hello @Christilut,

I don't know if you changed the text but at the time of writing I totally understand what your project is doing.
That does not mean it is a good sign, because I know static websites (sws) are and I am into the market too.
Not into CMS but other things like form backend as a service and soon themes for static websites.

users that are unfamiliar with static websites are not sure what to do here
If you also target users that do not use (and don't know) what sws is, maybe you should change the message a bit and do not talk about sws (as contentful and prismic do).

Perfect for blogs, Pokémon collections and anything in between.
Maybe it's just me but I don't feel this "Pokémon collections" part. It's not "professional".

I hope the pricing is fair
It depends. There are no big differences between the "free plan" and the "hobby plan". For me there is too much "unlimited", maybe you should restrict some features. Maybe limit the number of websites in the "free plan" or add a user to the "hobby plan".

Do you have any users? Did you try to reach people who use wordpress?

This comment was deleted 9 years ago