Ten notes on worksnap.eu

The hero, the first line on the page

What

The first thing a visitor reads is a small uppercase badge, “For freelancers & consultants”, and the headline right under it says “Time tracking for freelancers who bill by the hour”. The audience is named twice before anything new is said. Two more uppercase lines like it sit above headings further down (“Everything you need, nothing you don’t” and “And you’re not the product either”).

Why it costs you

The badge is the smallest type on the page in the most expensive position, and it spends the reader’s first second repeating the headline. The two later lines read as slogans and push the real headings down the screen.

The fix

Delete all three. The headline already names the audience, and the two section headings stand on their own.

The hero headline

What

“Time tracking for freelancers who bill by the hour” could sit on Toggl, Clockify or Harvest without a change. The one thing none of them can say, that there is no paid plan and the structure makes that permanent, is in the bold paragraph underneath, where a skimmer and a link preview will not see it.

Why it costs you

The headline is what Hacker News, a search result and a shared link show. Right now it names the category and hides the reason to pick this one.

The fix

Put the promise in the headline and the category in the deck: “Time tracking for freelancers, free, with no paid plan now or later.” The bold paragraph then becomes the deck.

The hero, the screencast on the right

What

The video autoplays, loops and has no controls, so the only way to stop it is the reduced motion setting at the system level, which the page does respect and that is rarer than it should be. At desktop width the frame is 440 pixels wide, and the text inside the recording, “Homepage redesign” and the running clock, renders at about seven pixels.

Why it costs you

WCAG 2.2.2 asks for a way to pause anything that moves for more than five seconds, and this is the first thing on the page a visitor could fail. The one look at the product in the hero is also a blur, so it proves the app exists and little else.

The fix

Add the controls attribute, or a small pause button under the frame. Then record the timer row alone, so one entry, its project and the clock fill the frame and can be read.

The hero, the line under the buttons

What

“The commitments on the Free Core page haven’t changed since 28 July 2026” is the proof line, and it is set in the smallest, grayest type on the page. July was three months ago, so the date reads as young rather than as steady.

Why it costs you

A three-month-old promise does not carry weight on its own. What does is already on the About page: one named person, a sole proprietor in Poland, who writes the code and answers the email. That is the reason to believe the promise, and it is not on the home page.

The fix

Replace the date line with “Built and run by Tomasz Stryczyński, one person, in Poland” and link it to the About page. The date can live on the Free Core page and get older on its own.

The hero, the three calls to action

What

Within one screen there are three links: “Why I can promise that”, “Start tracking” and “See what’s free”. The first and the third both go to the Free Core page.

Why it costs you

Two differently worded links to the same page tell a visitor there are two things to read before starting, so “Start tracking” shares the attention three ways. The page already tracks these clicks separately in Umami, so the split is visible in the numbers.

The fix

Keep “Start tracking” and one quiet link, “Read the Free Core promise”. Drop the inline link from the bold paragraph.

“Six things, done properly”, the feature cards

What

Six identical cards, each with a small icon in a tinted square, a bold title and about 55 words of gray text. The icons (a dollar sign, a calendar, a stopwatch, a bar chart, a chain link, a phone) repeat the titles. “Prepaid hours that renew” and “Every client in their own currency”, the two things most free trackers do not have, get the same weight as “Built for your phone”.

Why it costs you

Equal cards flatten the one decision this section should make, which is what to read first. Six matching boxes with icons is also the layout every template ships with, and the rest of this page is clearly not a template.

The fix

Remove the cards and the icons. Set the six as a plain list down one column, titles and bodies in the same ink, with prepaid hours first and currencies second.

The teal band in the middle of the page

What

“There is no paid plan. So there is nothing to move behind one.” repeats the hero’s bold paragraph almost word for word. Counting the hero, the line under the buttons and this band, “no paid plan” appears seven times on the page and the word “free” twenty-six times.

Why it costs you

Repetition is the biggest cost here. The desktop page is about 3,500 pixels tall and the phone page is close to 6,000, and the length comes from saying the same true thing in several places rather than from having a lot to say.

The fix

Cut the band. The one new sentence in it, “It’s one person, one product, and a deliberately small scope”, belongs in the hero in place of the repeated promise.

“Notice something missing?”, the privacy section

What

The heading is a riddle and the answer, that there was no cookie banner, is in the paragraph under it. Below that are three boxed statements that each begin with “We never” or “Your data”.

Why it costs you

A heading that withholds its point costs every reader a beat, and someone moving through the page by headings, with a screen reader or by skimming, hears a question with no content. The three boxes add borders to sentences that would read faster as sentences.

The fix

Make the heading the fact: “There is no cookie banner because nothing here needs one.” Keep the first paragraph, and run the three statements as three short sentences in one paragraph without boxes.

“Small on purpose”, the “It does” and “It doesn’t” lists

What

Both lists are single run-on lines with middle dots between the items, in gray: “teams or shared workspaces · tags or sub-tasks · integrations with Jira, Trello or anything else · invoicing · a public API · a native mobile app”. On a phone each one is a six-line gray block.

Why it costs you

The “It doesn’t” list is the most useful paragraph on the page. It is the one that stops the wrong person signing up, which the sentence after it says is exactly the point. A dotted run-on in gray is the kind of text people skip.

The fix

Set each as a real list, one item per line, in the same ink as the headings. Seven short lines are easier to scan than a paragraph of dots.

The whole page, in dark mode

What

The page follows the system color setting and offers no switch. On a dark system the page goes dark, the buttons turn mint, and the hero screencast stays a bright light-mode recording inside a white rounded frame, because there is only one video.

Why it costs you

Anyone whose laptop is set to dark, which includes a lot of people reading Hacker News at night, gets a first screen where the product demo glows in a different theme from the page around it. It reads as unfinished even though everything else on the page is careful.

The fix

Either keep the marketing page light whatever the system setting says and let the app follow the setting, or record a second screencast in the app’s dark theme and swap it in with a prefers-color-scheme media query.