If you’re like me, over the last few weeks you attended a few holiday parties. As online invitation sites start to replace traditional mail invites, I thought I’d take a look at a local start-up mypunchpowl.com.

Over the next several posts I’ll provide my opinions on the first time experience. From first engagement to sending out invites.

Mypunchbowl.com Home Page

Call to action

The homepage should have one focus which is draw the user into some kind of activity. Most analytics show this is where sites lose the majority of their traffic. It is crucial to engage the user with a label that has value to them. This home page has “Create free account” as the call to action. If you’re like me, that sounds like you’ve just tasked me with some work. I read that and say: “great, I’ll need to type in a bunch of fields on a form before I start.”

Recommendation:
Instead the label should read “Start planning your event” or “Send online invitations now”. Definitely something to test but it needs to express value to the user, not the site or the system.

Below the fold

The rest of the page has a lot of information. There are testimonials, planning advice, birthday party advice, learn more links, location maps, reasons to celebrate, send e-cards, and a message from the CEO. Some of these may be important when educating the return user but just server to slow the first time experience with visual noise.

Recommendation:
Reduce the total amount of information below the call to action. Focus only on what is going to convince the user to respond to the call to action.

It’s important to know whether a user is a new user or return user. The value proposition is different for them. The use of cookies and dynamic homepages are a great way to segment this traffic.