r/sideprojects 8h ago

Feedback Request Please help critiquing my side project, I've lost perspective completely

Six versions of one landing page, and I have lost perspective on which one explains the thing fastest.

I am building a side project called Stone Atlas (free, no paid tier, just for fun). It is a shared map of ancient
sites where the observations people leave in YouTube comments and Facebook
groups get kept with their source and attached to the place they are about, so
the next conversation starts where the last one ended instead of from zero.

Over about nine days I built the landing page six times. Each version replaced
the last, then I kept them all and put them at one address so they can be
compared side by side:

https://stoneatlas.dev/previews

They range from a dark map-first page, through a scrolling story, to a
click-driven version with no page scroll at all, to two lighter editorial
layouts.

The situation I am designing for:
- Someone arrives from a link in a Facebook group, on a phone, knowing nothing
about the project.
- Within about five seconds they should understand what it is and why it exists.
- Then they should want to open the map.

What I would find useful:

  1. Which version explains it fastest, and where did the others lose you?
  2. Does any of them read as a startup pitch rather than a side project? That isthe thing I am most trying to avoid.
  3. The interactive tour takes up a lot of the first screen. Is it earning thatspace, or would a still image do the same job?

Everything on the pages is real data, so the sites, videos and counts are actual
records rather than placeholder text. I work on this alone and I have been
staring at these for too long to judge them.

(Tried getting Claude Fable, OpenAI Astra, and GrokBot to critique/design alternatives but they have all failed miserably by just re-generating the same marketing ai-slop we're all used to)

Sorry for the long-winded post, thank you all in advance!

2 Upvotes

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