Ask HN: What to write on landing page?

[hodbby]

I am developing a real estate site. The site is for business real estate and not the private sector.

The question is how important is it to state this on the landing page?

Let's ask it more general, how important is it to declare to the public on your landing page (home page) the niche of your site? (compare to the general subject of your site)

Maybe to leave it uncertain is also good?

[sebg]

Uncertainty is not helpful. If you subscribe to the YC style of startup landing pages (look at almost all YC companies), it is exceedingly clear what the website does in one sentence.

Examples:

Airbnb - Find a place to stay.

Picplum - Share Your Best Moments

Carwoo - Great New Car Deals

Referly - Recommend products you love

Then after that headline, they go into more detail:

Airbnb - Rent from people in 26,893 cities and 192 countries.

Picplum - Send photo prints to loved ones in seconds.

Carwoo - None Of The Games

Referly - And earn rewards when people buy them

Notice that in all of them, they have a great sentence in 4-6 key words, then a tagline that details what it does specifically. Regarding your comment elsewhere on this page "The reason is that I want to attract 'others' to my site- for future use". This is a bad idea. Focus on one thing and do it extremely well. The future will take care of itself. If you aren't able to get the real estate site to work now by being focused, then the future site won't matter.

[codegeek]

You landing page should be as specific as possible in my experience as a user. If I visit a unknown site's landing page, I look for specifics right away to understand what the product does and for whom. In your case, you must mention business real estate. How you mention it is left to the creativity and imagination of yours.

[hodbby]

Can any of you know what padmapper.com is about through landing page? is it business? private? is it like taskrabbit? that's what i mean... can i do it as well?

[sebg]

You can know through the domain name. Then when it loads up, the tag line is "Making Apartment Hunting Suck Less" with google maps right behind it. To me that's pretty clear that it will tell me what apartments are available for rent in the region I specify.

[gyardley]

How could clearly explaining what your site does and who it's for not be the right thing to do?

I can't even begin to think of a reason why you would hide this from potential users.

[hodbby]

It is not for hidden reasons. The reason is that i want to attract 'others' to my site- for future use.

[yitchelle]

If this was the case, wouldn't that give you the wrong impression to the interest level for your product?

I mean, how would differentiate the one that are seriously interested from the "others"?

[bmelton]

It sounds like you're trying to trick more people into registering by hiding the niche from the people who aren't in it.

What will almost certainly happen instead is that fewer people will sign up overall. Especially for something like 'real estate', which is a well served market by a lot of B players, you need to entice people into signing up -- your best bet of that is to clearly identify the benefits to your target demographic.

There is no benefit in having 1 million people sign up that then realize the service "isn't for them". If you're charging for membership, then obviously that changes, but nobody is going to sign up for a pay service unless the benefits are clearly spelled out.

[hodbby]

OK all, I got your point and I guess I have no other choice but to use it. Thanks for the comments.