"- I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me."
If you have a few minutes and are willing to use your sense of aestethics, please have a look at http://www.displayator.com and give me your two cents about what sucks most about it. i.e.:
There's a lot of explaining on your site where you should be doing a LOT more showing. Use some awesome HTML5 tech to put a "live" demo of your app on the landing page. Load a largish file and offer the user to "zoom in" and "zoom out" on the play device to imitate what your device does for them. A "live" demo would eliminate the need for portrait/landscape examples under the first demo phone. Put links under your "live" demo which will load your example Displayables (the Great Wave, Railway maps, etc) inside the demo. In just the suggestion alone, I've shorted your page to less than two screens of scrolling (on my display). I personally hate the long-form sell and think it should be as obvious as possible as quickly as possible.
The layout could be much improved. I'm guessing you know this already since you primed me to think it was ugly in your request. I'm viewing on a 1280x800 display and can't see the full demo iPhone on my screen. The nav at the top could be a little sleeker. Your call to action to "Start creating Displayables now!" shouldn't be buried. You could get a lot of mileage out of buying a pre-made theme and implementing that if you don't want to spend a lot of time of creating something.
Lower the friction to get your users support. Google Groups and email are not scalable ways to support your users. I'm not saying this should go away, but consider at least putting a form that emails you so they don't have to open their mail client, think up a subject and free form some thoughts in your direction. Ideally, make feedback simple, easy and fun.
I already reduced the height of the iPhone and the page as a whole, bringing the "start creating Displayables now" closer to the top.(down to 2 screens from 4).
Still working on the live HTML 5 demo. After that I'll work on decreasing the support friction.
"- I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me."
If you have a few minutes and are willing to use your sense of aestethics, please have a look at http://www.displayator.com and give me your two cents about what sucks most about it. i.e.:
- is it clear what is it about?
- what's most ugly about it ?
Thank you very much,
Nicolas