Recently I have noticed a ton of new websites that prominently feature a big “SIGN UP” feature on their front page.
- DreamHost
- DailyBooth
- disqus
- weebly
- others…
Some of these services, like weebly, are services that I think are absolutely awesome web services, and it does make sense for a growing website to put it’s emphasis on drawing in new users. The issue that irritates me however is that they make existing user login a pain. It’s usually an itsy bitsy little thing somewhere in the corner. Worse yet, usually after spending some time locating the itsy bitsy little sign up button I then need to go ahead and click on it to get some sort of javascripty pop up that I can type in. Every time this happens I feel a little bit more mad and like finding the website creator and giving them a giant wedgie, or something equally horrible. Is it actually necessary to punish existing users to sign up new ones. The one that irritates me the most is weebly, they actually put my focus in the sign up form so when I type I’m entering sign up information. Actually scratch that… I’m actually pretty sure disqus is trying to *hide* their login form.
What’s the right way to do this? I’m not sure, but check out the following sites.
These sites all decide that it’s not necessary to punish you because you are already a user. Gmail actually keeps your account info filled in with the focus in the password field, so when you get there all I need to do is type my password and press “enter”. Thank god, I don’t even need to look at the page to log in. Prezi and Voxli do the next best thing, which is requiring me to only press “tab” to get to the login field. What’s more these sites *still* manage to include a big sign up button that I don’t need to spend a ton of time searching for. Well done!!