[BoorishBears]

I know this is off topic, but that homepage is a piece of work: https://buildkite.com

I get it's quirky, but I'm at a low energy state and just wanted to know what it does...

Right before I churned out, I happened to click "[E] Exit to classic Buildkite" and get sent to their original homepage: https://buildkite.com/platform/

It just tells you what it Buildkite does! Sure it looks default B2B SaaS, but more importantly it's clear. "The fastest CI platform" instead of some LinkedIn-slop manifesto.

If I want to know why it's fast, I scroll down and learn it scales to lots of build agents and has unlimited parallelism!

And if I wonder if it plays nice with my stack, I scroll and there's logos for a bunch of well known testing frameworks!

And if I want to know if this isn't v0.0001 pre-alpha software by a pre-seed company spending runway on science-fair home pages, this one has social proof that isn't buried in a pseudo-intellectual rant!

-

I went down the rabbit hole of what lead to this and it's... interesting to say the least.

https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/nothing-works-until-you-m...

https://www.reddit.com/r/branding/comments/1pi6b8g/nothing_w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1petsis/comment/nsm...

[mitchjj]

Hello mate, Head of Brand and Design at BK here. Thanks for the feedback, genuinely; the homepage experiment has been divisive, in a great way. Some folk love it, some folk hate it, some just can't be bothered with it. All fair.

Glad that the classic site hit the mark, but a lot work to do to make that clearer than it is; we're working on the next iteration that will sunset the CLI homepage into an easter egg.

Happy to take more critique, either on the execution or the rabbit hole.

[BoorishBears]

Great of you to accept critiques, but I don't think there's anything more I can add.

You brought up Planetscale's markdown homepage rework in one of those posts and I actually think it's great... but it's also clear, direct, and has no hidden information.

I'd love to see what happens to conversions once you retire this to an Easter Egg.

[mitchjj]

Yeah, PS did a great job and provoked good business impact too.

We'll publish details when we do retire it to show how it performed and the reactions. Something like this thread is great for feedback to contrast against other sources.

[jjgreen]

I did a BK search earlier in the article and ended on the same page, decided I couldn't be bothered to play those sort of games and clicked away. The GPs link actually looks rather interesting so I'll investigate, so take this a hate-it-folk vote.

[mitchjj]

Understandable; let me ask a a question. You don't want to play these sort of games (read a paragraph, enter a word). For you, browsing to find a compelling devtool, what makes you say, this is legit? Can you share examples of a couple of sites that do exactly what you are after?

I say that not because we wanted the CLI homepage to be 'legit', the light context there is we needed a way to quickly change direction from a previous failed initiative that added stark category marketing across the classic site... so took the opportunity to do purposefully do something very different from conventions, rightly or wrongly.

[jjgreen]

I'd never heard of BK before and I see some positive opinions on HN; I manage a small company's CI, we're really rather happy with GitLab CI, but I'm always on the lookout for something better. Clicking through to your page I'm looking to quickly find out what are the features, why it's different, how much it costs ... and for that a boring, routine website is what I'm hoping for. I'm very much not against the command-line (most places I work people complain that I use the command line when "there's this really good GUI"), but command-lines are hard, they need to be learned -- when I'm just looking for the outline as to whether it's worth digging further I really don't want to have to learn your command-line in order to get it, boring and routine is better. Just one grunt's personal opinion -- best of luck with the business!

[mitchjj]

Nah that's great, and valuable. I hear you on, boring and routine likely facilitates further digging. Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it!

[sevenseacat]

oh wow, that's not good.

[mitchjj]

Would love to hear more from you on why