The irony here is how bad the press42.com landing page is; your value proposition is pretty unclear with your one sentence. Try working on your own landing page before dishing out criticism, (not to say that what you said isn't true).
Haha, yeah. I find it hilarious when a startup founder is running around doing business meetings and asking for tech cofounders and all this stuff, and I go to his landing page, and it has no information whatsoever. Like a tag line and a picture.<p>In one case I met the guy and he actually had a decent demo, but there was no way for anyone to ever see it and get some interest in working with him unless you already knew him ahead of time and were willing to meet him to see it. People like this just don't get the power of the internet at all.<p>Later on I mentioned his idea to a VC who was very into that space, and the VC got interested and immediately tried to lookup the app on the app store while I was talking to him, then asked for a web page. So the guy even blew VC interest by hiding his demo in his pocket. A YouTube video would have taken him 5 minutes and at least gotten him to YC "ugly duckling" demo day status.
YES, THIS.<p>While I wish this article actually provided some examples (I did that here too - <a href="http://www.johnfdoherty.com/landing-pages-that-rank/" rel="nofollow">http://www.johnfdoherty.com/landing-pages-that-rank/</a>), it's a decent rant.
I think startups confuse landing page with launch page. A launch page (i.e. ambiguous launchrock page) is to gain interest, quite possibly before you are certain what the MVP will do. A landing page (i.e. signup page) needs to communicate what value you bring to the person signing up. Too often the launch page turns into the landing page without much thought.
The Spanish web site I think he's referring to has an English version: <a href="http://greenmomit.es/en/" rel="nofollow">http://greenmomit.es/en/</a> , but the link is buried at the bottom of the page instead of at the top. The sarcasm of the author is a put off for me, like startups in an international competition didn't know about having pages in English.<p>Criticizing is easy, for example: a media company should know better than using grey fonts over a black background.
Everything in a startup is a trade-off.<p>When faced with "build product" vs "prettify website" what would most people here do?<p>Seems like a lot of folks here are making assumptions about what's most important to a given startup at a given time by looking from the outside. I'm sure in some cases they're right but not necessarily all.<p>Admittedly for 'launching' at a conference I'd assume an informative website would be a priority but what do I know?
"kudos to the other French start-ups for finally realizing that the world doesn’t speak French"<p>Pardon, but I don't believe there is a language the world speaks.<p>"three companies out of the sixteen had their webpage in their local language"<p>Does the author mean that thirteen of the websites were in English, and is complaining about the remaining three being in a different language? Would the author hold the same standard to English-first websites to translate them in to a variety of other local languages? If not, what an astonishingly self-centered perspective.
Regarding "have your contact details on your website, not an ugly, stupid and useless form that no one uses."<p>Is there any advantage to having a visible e-mail address your site vs a contact form?
Potential startup in there based on his form to ask for feedback - i.e. people pay to get feedback early on in their startups. Someone connects businesses with feedback people.