This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the shallow approach to design. Sure, it looks nice, but it functions awfully.<p>Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines. Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.<p>Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10 headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.<p>This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny things by following photoshop tutorials.
Why did they schedule maintenance for the middle of the day on which they launch? That seems like the <i>worst</i> time to take down your site for scheduled maintenance.<p>Doesn't take a marketer to know that.
inbound.org is a reference to Inbound Marketing, which Hubspot coined entirely.<p>HubSpot snapped the term "Inbound Marketing" (which really means "permission marketing") so they could differentiate more easily from other marketing software competitors.<p>The strategy is really smart. If you look for "inbound marketing" on Google, Hubspot has completely pushed down the older term by flooding the page with results they more or less created: conferences, groups, books, even a Wikipedia page defined by the company.<p>For old time marketers, "Inbound Marketing" meant "marketing research", as opposed to "Outbound Marketing" which meant "reaching out to users".<p>In a sense, it shows those guys are great at what they are doing, marketing.
Not to troll, but I think a segregation of the crowd here would be great. I know pg has made a few comments lately along the lines of "where did all these non-hackers come from?"<p>I feel like sub-HN's would be helpful, as I find myself generally reading programming tips and things much more than I read "how to get your conversions up".<p>Having a good community to submit that to and discuss would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for readers like me.
I love this concept, but I'm hoping they can manage to get a community that can keep the level of content high instead of the mostly link bait and spam articles the SEO community is known for.<p>A quick look at the home page for Inbound.org which has 25 articles shows:
* 9 articles that are "X Number of Things"
* 4 "The Guide to" articles
* 2 "How to" articles<p>That's 15 out of 25 articles that are mostly filled with shallow link bait type articles. Granted I didn't read all of them so I'm sure some are good and deserve to be high on the page but the ratio is way off.<p>By comparison the HN home page has zero of the same type of articles.<p>Now maybe that's what they are going for, but personally I'd love to see less lists and more high quality content around marketing.
My only problem with this is that I can't see how this isn't going to be hugely insular, and spammed to death by self-promoting "marketers".<p>I'm curious how it's going to avoid turning in to what Sphinn at the worst times.
Very good!
Two questions<p>1) How did you build this? Some pre-made system or not?<p>2) Is there a list of more specific communities like this? Examples: entrepreneurship only, selling only, consulting only.
You have way too many articles on the front page. It feels a little ridiculous that I have to scroll down on a 24" monitor at 1920x1080 to read everything.<p>It's a little similar to what I said about another side: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547100" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547100</a>.<p>I might accept a lot of articles in one page, but I should be able to view everything in one "page" regardless.
Love the concept and I'm hopeful that it gets the traction deserved.<p>A couple of UI comments from a brain that spends all day on conversion / UI:<p>a) HN at 1280x1024 gives you nearly 30 items without scrolling vs. ~10 on Inbound which feels like a UI problem.<p>b) The header is unnecessarily large, the "Hot Articles" title is redundant to the point of the site. In conversion testing I've never seen a larger header improve sticky/conversion and less is always more.<p>c) On hover you activate the color change of the story table but I still have to navigate to the actual link for the click through which is non-intuitive.<p>d) Categorizing is an interesting idea but I think that appeal of HN and many specific community sites (or subreddits for that matter) is that sub-categorizations aren't necessary. EG the community picks the content that's interesting to the community, and category sorting is a "power user" desire, but just confuses the 95%.<p>Big fan of the work you guys do elsewhere, hope this sticks!
I've been a part of the beta of inbound.org, and have been really impressed with the community thus far.<p>It's still very immature and small, but it brings together some of the brightest minds in inbound marketing.<p>Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) deserve a lot of gratitude for getting this community started.
I've also been a part of the beta testing and think it will be a great tool. I love HN for the technical and startup material and have found some amazing material here. I hope Inbound.org is the start of other awesome crowdsourced communities in the HN-style model.<p>Hats off to Rand and Dharmesh.
Design suggestion: I am more interested in seeing the score given by the community rather than the rank awarded by an algorithm. I think you should replace the large position text (#1, #2, etc) and with the # of upvotes.
Great initiative. This has been lacking in marketing industry. Although as others have pointed, I think UI could be polished a bit. It doesn't yet feel as fluid as HN.
Maybe something like this? Just a few minutes in developer tools.<p><a href="http://cl.ly/1p1C0t0E3A0H400L293J" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/1p1C0t0E3A0H400L293J</a>
Really looking forward to checking this out once it's back online - a marketing site with a community even half as strong as HNs would be absolutely great.