Publishing Base22 portal was a major goal for the company in 2013 and we work so hard to create a first version and we are so proud of it!!, but we are far from done and we still have many more features planned. Following that evolution, we focused in redefine our introduction in the home page, how?, well, omitting needless words by killing happy talks!!

As much we liked the first introduction, see next screenshot, we never feel comfortable at all on leave it as it was, why?, because in resume, it was a happy talk, but, what is wrong with that? and, what is a happy talk?

The best way to answer those questions is citing Steve Krug on his book Do not Make Me Think!, second edition.

“Happy talk must die

We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.

If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah….”

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.

Although happy talk is sometimes found on Home pages—usually in paragraphs that start with the words “Welcome to…”—its favored habitat is the front pages of the sections of a site (“section fronts”). Since these pages are often just a table of contents with no real content of their own, there’s a temptation to fill them with happy talk. Unfortunately, the effect is as if a book publisher felt obligated to add a paragraph to the table of contents page saying, “This book contains many interesting chapters about _____, _____, and _____. We hope you enjoy them.”

Happy talk is like small talk—content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can—and should—eliminate as much happy talk as possible.”

Now, after killing happy talks, Our home page has a new fresh and fancy carrousel that illustrate in a better way what we are and what we do in Base22.

So, avoid happy talks and more important, omit needless words as much as you can.

Hope you find this information useful!!