Item — HN Reader

The visual language looks slick to me, and it appears that a lot of thought went into the redesign. A few critical remarks (intended as constructive feedback/thoughts):

- I second the point from the sibling comment that the 3d transformations don’t feel right for the terminal demos. I first didn’t realise at all that the terminal demos show-cased something meaningful. And when I did, I found it hard to follow, due to the distortion.

- The terminal demos are a cool idea, but seeing that you also try to target a non-technical audience, I’m not sure it’s the most approachable and expressive medium. Maybe a video with voice-over comments would be easier to follow?

- There is a lot of content on the page, and I’m not sure I understand the information hierarchy. Like: below the intro header, it starts with certificate stuff, then some general selling points, then some DNS demo I don’t really know what it’s about, then certificates again, then other features, etc. Overall, it feels borderline overwhelming to me.

- Related to my previous point, if I wouldn’t know Caddy previously, I might get the impression that Caddy is mainly about certificates/TLS, just because that’s featured very prominently. Maybe my mental model wasn’t right, though, because I always thought Caddy was a general-purpose web server primarily, that also happens to provide some nifty convenience features around certificate auto-renewal.

- Very nitty: I find the green background glow a bit too bright, and hence contrasting too little with the green text colour of the headline. Also, does the dark mode button have any effect?

1 comments

This is good feedback, thanks!

Ok, we'll try to think of another visually interesting way to tell a non-visual story, to see if we can replace the 3D transforms.

I just hate the trend that most tech landing pages have these days of random graphics that don't mean anything. I want our content to be substantial.

You're right there's a lot of content. I'm not best sure how to organize it, except maybe to break it into other pages. There's a LOT to cover and convey. I just didn't have time to break it up for this iteration but maybe we will later!

_> Related to my previous point, if I wouldn’t know Caddy previously, I might get the impression that Caddy is mainly about certificates/TLS, just because that’s featured very prominently. Maybe my mental model wasn’t right, though, because I always thought Caddy was a general-purpose web server primarily, that also happens to provide some nifty convenience features around certificate auto-renewal._

Caddy's flagship feature is TLS -- most people discover it because of its exceptional offering here. But you are right, it is a general purpose server and proxy. But our TLS features is one major thing that sets us apart.

I'll also see what we can do about the green background, maybe to darken it a bit.

Dark mode does have an effect on some pages, like the Features page. And the up-and-coming docs pages that aren't published yet. The theme makes a big difference on those, and it will on the homepage someday too.

Really appreciate your consideration! We'll work on improvements.

> I just hate the trend that most tech landing pages have these days of random graphics that don't mean anything. I want our content to be substantial.

Couching substantial content in the visual language of "random graphics" results in the parent comment.

You could have cake and eat some of it too if the transforms straightened out on mouseover/click/tap. It wouldn't make the transformed ones any easier to read, but it'd at least let people opt out of the flash to focus on the substance (and further signal that they _aren't_ random graphics despite the effect).