Verbosity is a deadly sin

Investors say you should be able to explain your projet on the back of a business card. Describing it very simply is always a very difficult exercise, and it often validates whether a project is viable or not.

This is the same for the presentation pages of a web product: the fewest presentation pages the better. There should be only one page. Visitors won’t read them all and will miss some important points otherwise.

Before today, Web Translate It had 3 presentation pages besides the home page. There was “Why using Web Translate It?”, “Integrate your app with Web Translate It” and finally, the “Tour” page, which was horribly out of date.

Information was spread across these 3 pages, which were repeating themselves and weren’t up to date. The problem was:

• visitors didn’t understand what is Web Translate It.
• it was 3 times more work to update these pages when I released a new feature, as I needed to update them all.
• finally, the “why” and “integration” page were totalling more than 700 words. Now I start translating Web Translate It, this is a very important matter.

So I deleted the 2 former pages and instead made a much better Tour page.

The page is more aerated, the font is more readable and invites people to read on. I also added more screenshots and a screencast.

It contains lots of useful information, and even if you are already a Web Translate It user, you can learn a few tips to work faster.