Support the Sale with Lots of Information
Basecamp is a simple and elegant project collaboration tool from 37signals. Perhaps somewhat contrary to their philosophy of simplicity, the homepage provides plenty of information.
Essentially though it is simple. The calls to action are in large red underlined text - ‘Take a tour’ or ‘Sign up for a free Basecamp account’. Everything else supports these clicks. ‘Sign up just takes a minute’, ‘No contracts or sign-up fees’ and ‘Cancel at any time’ are placed just under the calls to action.
All this is further backed up by simple text link points of resolution (’even looks great on paper’, ‘your data is safe’) and what seems like an unending supply of testimonials. Interesting too, the large text link ‘get pricing’ brings you to the sign-up page - keeping you on track.
Written by Thomas Holmes and posted on Thursday, 9th November, 2006.
While surfing I came across the article ‘Web Design is 95% Typography (2)‘ which is well worth a read. In it, Oliver mentions how:
Cameron Moll also mentions this in his recent ‘Nine skills that separate good and great designers‘ presentation - “treat text as UI”.
It’s interesting looking again at the Basecamp page now knowing this. Most of the page in the screenshot above is text. It is pretty low on graphics overall. It is essentially text making up the user interface. Interesting also the colour coding of the links: red for calls to action and the default blue for the points of resolution. All links underlined.
On the 37signals site, in ‘Getting Real: Copywriting is interface design‘ they write:
↓ Quote | March 16, 2007
Uh, don’t mind me - more notes to myself. Brian from Copyblogger just wrote about the 37 signals approach to copyrighting. It seems they don’t test these sort of changes to their website.
↓ Quote | March 16, 2007