This 16y old boy builds a sweet website – good enough to reach #1 on this page – just to push his goal of a year in CA and you offer an introductory "… causes Chrome to lag". Come on, that's better stuff than I see from some 'professionals'.

The new style of sales page is not about flowing downwards - its about having one message (getting to school in the US), emphasise what the purchaser will gain, filter out those its not going to benefit, and be consistently repeating the message.

The kids page does this - it sells his sponsorship needs really well.

Everything else is noise.

I cannot point to any research but I am pretty sure that a sales page that

has focus, one message, filters out its non-target audience and clearly and simply repeats its message

is better

than unfocused, off message, vague sales pages.

Whether they flow downwards or not is of secondary order.

Maybe, but the style invariably turns on my shuckster-dar. But what you're saying is that perhaps that's the intent: only the easily persuaded proceed and the jaded bounce.

I'm inclined to agree with you. In fact I personally prefer the boring sites where most of the important content is presented on screen with minimal scrolling. However I also started building websites in the early 90s when bandwidth dictated design.

That all said, I want to take anything away from this guy, he's done a fantastic job and deserves recognition.

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to bash the kid. I like his site, and he makes a great sales pitch.

My comment was more aimed at the OP's assertion that this sales page is "better" than other sales pages.

For those that are confused about this thread, the original title of this link was 'This 16yo boy from eastern europe has a better sales page than you'

I wasn't meaning to imply you were bashing the kid (though now you've mentioned it, I can see how my post may have read that way). Sorry for the confusion :)

HN readers are so polite!

I must be getting old. Is the example "boring" page really out of style? I've always found that icon bullet point presentation to be great at conveying all of the up-front information I want in a compact and easily parsable way.

The Prey Project website (http://preyproject.com/), to me, is one of the best designed product pages I've seen. It uses the "boring" style, too..

I think the difference here is knowing what you want. Generally you'll go to Linode because you know what a dedicated server is, you know you want to buy one. You get a comprehensive list of the features because it assumes you know the domain.

I think the newer, 'trendy' flow pages tend to be marketing a solution to a problem you didn't know you had - stuff that's less defined than 'I need a dedicated server'. Perhaps you need to be won over to the idea that you need the product in the first place.

I don't think OP's intent was to elicit a comparison of this young man's landing page with that of other established businesses, rather he chose a headline in order to bring attention (and HN upvotes) to Marek's request.

Webpages changes fashion with a rather steady rate.

Before this growing style, white "clean" pages with minimal content was in style and is still in favor. Before then, extremely detailed "photoshopped" pages with a bunch of flash was in style (and menus, menus, menus). Before then, geocity and frontpage style, with blinking animations and sound. Before then, Spreadsheet style and link tables.

I wonder what this style should be called. I do like the name "flow style".

I've always found it quite fascinating to see these 'trends' appear, and wondered which ones have been before. I think I would have described something similar as you did up to geocity, and before that I wouldn't know, but it's nice to get a feeling from that time from how you describe it. Would be nice to see this visualised some time.

Website loads fine (no lag) on Chrome Win8 for me.

Do you not get scroll-bar lag? When I try to scroll up and down the page there is a very noticeable lag and upon initial load scrolling is inconsistent.

Chrome 23 + Win7 here, page was fine and had no scroll lag whatsoever.

Chrome and Firefox work fine, no lag, over here (Ubuntu). Must be a specific problem on the GP's machine.

Chrome on Xubuntu is perfect too.

Page loads just fine on Chrome on Ubuntu as well.

Chrome 23 on Mac - no issues with scrolling.

Same with Chrome on my MBA. The site looks pretty good, actually.

You shouldn't blame the webdev for you using a slow browser. There are plenty of other browsers out there that are faster if you are concerned about speed.