Who are you scaring away? The power of first impressions: One website that totally nailed it for me

I really like a lot of things about this link: https://www.statuspage.io

I wasn’t looking for this company when I stumbled across their web site. I wasn’t even out comparing similar services. I was looking into ways to manage continuous integration testing and deployment for web applications. That is what brought me to the Travis CI website. Travis CI is a set of tools, a service, that can handle your application’s continual integration needs. I was impressed with what I was seeing.

Looking into Travis CI naturally sent my brain firing off questions. Who supports this product? Who is funding development on this product? Where did it come from? I didn’t have to do any digging at all to find a link to the parent, StatusPage.io. What I saw impressed me so much that I am writing this blog post about it. Neat, eh?

One huge part of it is that I really like seeing companies turn their internal tools into a marketable product, which is what I am assuming happened with Travis CI. If I am assuming correctly, StatusPage.io had a need for a tool such as Travis CI. They solved the problem by developing the tool and when they were done decided they could offer it as a product. They would likely be investing developer dollars into Travis CI just to meet their own needs. Why not make it available publicly? In addition to the potential of subsidizing development costs with license sales, their software would be subjected to ever more vigorous scrutiny. More corner cases could be found. Use cases would expand. Features would be requested. And, ultimately, a more robust piece of software is created.

Second, StatusPage.io’s selective attention to detail screams out to in two distinct locations on their website: the video demo of the administration console, and the status subscription options available on their status page(ha…). The video demo showed exactly what I was expecting to see, given the information I had thus far gathered about the service. The interface presented was clearly designed by someone with a passion for the user experience.

The provided sample status page, which happens to be the status page for StatusPage.io itself, shows off the ability for a casual user to subscribe to receive status updates. Yeah, it is kinda cool, but I don’t remember the last time I subscribed, via email, to receive downtime notifications from a service. Plus, I already get way too many emails. But, as I would expect by now, they take it further by offering several options for notifications. How about an RSS feed? Sure. How about an SMS? Ok. How about I send an SMS to the person that is filling in for me while I am on vacation…done. Suddenly, this evolves from a cute feature to something powerful. I could absolutely make use of a multi-alert status notification system in production, if not only for the ability to spam myself with notifications the second something really bad happens. Heck I could even subscribe my wife’s mobile number in case, while on vacation, I drop my mobile into a storm drain after leaving my laptop, tablet and in my laptop bag at the airport lounge.

“Here I am, take it or leave it.”

To me, there is something simply brilliant about that statement and that is the statement that resonates throughout this company’s website, marketing, and product line. I love the design and layout of their website. Clean…Focused…Trustworthy are all adjectives that I associate with this design. I feel like they are providing a clear, 100% upfront look into what type of company they strive to be. A company that provides exceptional quality. A company that doesn’t need to distract me with marketing-puke. A company that would go swimming without its shirt on and not give a shit. A company that truly follows the age-old adage of “…do your best always, even when no one is looking.”

I am not even going to get into all of the other little things that won approval with me: HTTPS, giving back to the open source community, cool TLD, sexy logo, great choice of font…I could keep going for a while…

In a word: sold.

Now, let’s see if everything I took away from this company’s image truly does translate to reality.

If you have any experience with StatusPage.io, I am anxious to hear how well any of my conclusions stack up against reality. Fire your thoughts off below!