Major redesign finished. Let me know what you think!
TLDR: https://old.portabella.io is the old version => https://portabella.io is my redesign
I posted on here a couple of weeks ago and got some pretty brutal feedback on my landing page. Needless to say it was a big wake up call.
I've kept the old version of my landing page (https://old.portabella.io), and deployed my new one just now (https://portabella.io). I didn't just redesign the landing page, the actual application has changed a lot as well, you might be able to gather that from the screenshots. I haven't re-recorded the explainer video in the header yet.
Change summary
New logo
I've replaced the P on a blue square with a half mushroom half P logo. I'm not set on it yet but it's something I'm leaning towards
New colour palette
I switched my brand colour from a light blue (#1290a4) to darker purple (#952e8f). I received feedback that my design was cold, so I've landed on a new warmer colour palette
Less focused on end-to-end encryption
While providing an end-to-end encrypted is my primary goal, people stated that should be a bullet point on my feature list. I've pivoted to branding Portabella as more privacy preserving and privacy friendly in the hope it is more attractive for people
Misc.
I also sunk a bunch of time into various aspects such as:
- animations
- better calendar integration
- simplifying and getting rid of menus
to hopefully tidy up the general project management experience.
Let me know what you think!
I think the site looks nice, and it's great to have a live demo so immediately available. My main thought from your landing page, is that I'm not so sure about calling out your competitors so prominently. If anything, it makes me want to leave your page and check them out as well (I haven't heard of some). Also, e.g. Trello and Jira are quite different services, despite broadly being "project management" applications - so I'm not sure that really tells much about your own product, per se. I would probably want to use that space to make a case for your product that stands on its own.
And one thought about the product itself (from trying out the live demo) - I was surprised to see that I couldn't drag and drop the kanban cards? I skimmed through your video and saw that you actually can drag and drop... so I'm guessing your live demo is just frozen so it can't be modified? It might be worth calling out that out, as my first impression was that you can't drag and drop, which would be an immediate turn off for me if I'm looking for a nice kanban board.
Hey Mike, cheers for this. Definitely great points.
I do struggle making the header perfect, not sure what the solution is. It's definitely better than what it was. I like the text thing I do where it rewrites the word, what if I changed it to "Privacy preserving project management for individuals|startups|organisations|non-profits", do you think that would appeal more?
That demo site is a public, read only demo. I should put that on the button.
Yeah I think that's definitely an improvement! In terms of the "perfect" header, I would really try to hone in on who exactly Portabella is for, and why/how Portabella is for them. To me it's not crystal clear yet, and I'm not sure you're intention is really just to go toe-to-toe with Jira/Asana/Trello, etc per se. For one, they probably have got you beat on UX and features, at least at this moment.
But also, as an example, you say Portabella is for "enterprises" - but is it really? If I were a large org looking for project management software, I would almost certainly want SSO, so we could integrate with Okta or whatnot. Is that something that's on your roadmap? It doesn't really feel like Portabella is viable enterprise software (yet?) - but that's okay! Maybe that's not your target, or maybe it is and you're not there yet.
So yeah, I would really just try to hone in on the specific and unique proposition you want to make, and who it is exactly you want to make it to. If you can get to the bottom of that, I think the "perfect header" will naturally fall out of that thought exercise. I'm with you that there are most likely people out there who have projects they want to manage using typical tooling, but also care deeply about owning their data, prioritizing privacy and encryption. You just gotta figure out who those people really are, and how to speak directly to them via your landing page copy and product.