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Re:What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages by hinkley on Thursday May 13, 2021 @02:47PM (#27145755)
As a developer I've had to pound into people's heads that as the company grows, very few things we have worked on rank as 'special' for more than a little bit.

You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't.

Documentation eventually turns into a data warehouse. There's so much of it and you can't keep it straight, so some memorable fraction of the time, going to a Wiki page or your bookmarks or - god forbid - browser history. It's basically a fishing expedition. You know that there's a thing that did X, but you don't remember which thing it was (and code names make that basically impossible), so you're just going to scan a bunch of them until you find the right one.

If every page is like those cooking recipes that are held hostage by the life story of the creator, you're going to get pretty grumpy. Landing pages remind me a lot of this, because I've looked at twenty tools and I can't remember which one is for Postgres backups and which one is for Javascript minification. No, this one is for JSON. Next tab.

Re:What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages by atatatat on Thursday May 13, 2021 @03:38PM (#27146377)
> You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't.

Here's why the web is a mess:

We've turned it over to Google, through search, and Google penalizes sites' rankings in search results for having Chrome users leave if they read the first line and realize the site or service isn't for them.

After all — your site is less engaging than the site that most users ended up on — right?!

Re:What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages by hinkley on Thursday May 13, 2021 @04:00PM (#27146648)
Perverse incentives.

Also I don't know about you, but when I'm researching something I open a new window, and I middle click all the reasonable looking links on the search page.

My time with that tab open has nothing to do with that tab. It's mostly to do with the tabs chronologically before them, and whether I see something shiny that distracts me.