We see a lot of landing pages for startups not yet ready to launch, but today I saw what may be the worst one yet. The loud sound effects that start without warning combined with the yellow background alarmed me and sent my blood pressure up. Then I see that the company describes itself using 20 or so tags (see image below), but nothing else to put these in context. Descriptive words include “photos, friends, favorites, writing, notes, music, business, gifting, blog, video, to do, news, rate, bulletin board, calendar, art, movies, and video.” Oh, and “money”
This means everything and nothing, of course. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen bad landing pages before. But they are usually bad in a “the engineers slapped this up in 5 minutes so that we could have a place for people to give us their email address” kind of way. I actually kind of like it when startups cut corners on design early on because they have no money are are focused on the back end. But ipicit’s landing page is bad in another kind of way – it looks like it involved designers. And quite probably consultants. I bet they spent a lot of time picking out those tags.
A final note – the site also has a little spam tool where you can enter in the emails of your friends and they’ll be notified when ipicit launches. It’s not a good idea to begin your relationship with a potential user via an unsolicited email message.
Now it turns out I’m not completely in the dark on what ipicit will be, because the person who tipped me off on them says they are “planning to take MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube users with their all in one interface.” So it sounds like a new social network. Knowing that, the tags make more sense. Why not just add a sentence saying something along those lines? It’s not like your competition (MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook) are going to be paying much attention, and people will have a better idea of what they are signing up for.
Of course I’m intruiged, as always. I’m a sucker for any landing page, even a terrible one. It’s launching on January 1, so we’ll know soon enough what all these tags are supposed to mean.
Update: Someone in the comments pointed out that Zombo is pretty bad, too. I agree, although I would like to hope that it isn’t actually a landing page for a new service? Let me know about any other atrocities that we’ve missed.