The Core

Recall that ALL the sites I frequent are ripped to an ugly state for utility & speed. But Woz brought it to mind again.  As it happens, I've been researching a type of concrete construction and the serps are dominated by 3 sites. One is professional, but plain. The other two are primarily driven by horrifically produced youtube videos (think children and pets walking in & out).  These last two are selling via Etsy and Amz aff stores.

I can't speak to that directly, but we did an A/B test with paid search traffic a year or two ago.

I was sure that a simpler, faster-loading home page would do better than a complex rich home page. So we drove paid search traffic to two versions.

The complex home page has *multiple* carousels, a social media "wall" that pulls in recent FB and IG posts, scrolls for screen after screen. The top carousel takes forever to show an image because first, the page has to load the script loader (require.js), then the script loader requests the scripts (JQuery, JQuery plugins, the carousel JS). Meanwhile, all the crap injected from GTM jumps the queue and loads all manner of tracking crap that competes with the script loader. Then the slider script lazy loads the images. No critical path rendering optimization. It's a MONSTER.

The pared-down page stripped out all of that. Static images, no carousel, no social wall, nothing above the fold that requires loading a script (menus require scripts to function, but not to display the top level), much shorter, much quicker both perceptive load and effective load. Should convert way better.

Anyway, I was proved wrong. The simpler page converted slightly worse than the monster.

If we had more traffic, the next step would be multivariate analysis, because clearly it wasn't the slower load times that lifted conversion. But which bell or whistle was it? Was it different for everyone? I don't know that. All I know is that the massive, complex, image-filled, script-heavy page out-converted my simpler test page.

>> aircrete

Right. You're selling a solution. We're selling a fantasy.

>aircrete

It has supposedly been around for a long time but fell into obscurity in the 1930s. It was used as a fire retardant & insulation material. 30 years ago, I learned about some fellows out in Arizona who were making papercrete and started casually following that.  Eventually aircrete crossed the path into my research as related. Its combination of light weight & being waterproof is really what piques my interest. 

>pier

I currently use a lot of salt-treated lumber in my projects. Environmental concerns have forced a change in the formulation and it is getting harder and harder to buy lumber that will withstand outdoor exposure.   In some water-contact applications, its light weight is problematic. AI couldn't sink a piling with high buoyancy, for instance.  But for pier decking or bulkhead cat walks, it might work.

> opportunity.

It has a lot of potential for crafts and garden projects. Cost of entry, even for larger volume production is cheap-ish.  I'll spend $500 for the high-volume foam generator and the double-paddle mixer for speedier production, but I cobble together my own set-up for far less --probably $200.

>project

200'/60m x 32"/1m path to the pier with cobblestone-like imprints. My big, blue-sky^(wishful) project is to put a slab in the crawlspace under my house.

"Plain" or "simple" don't necessarily mean "ugly".

>> worst videographer on the planet

I watched one of the videos and there's no way I'd call him that.

It was unpolished in some ways, but it had the major virtue of being informative. It was well enough edited to make good use of my time watching it.