Agreed. I took a look for about 30 seconds, then came here to say the same thing.
EVERY site should have a single sentence (at the least) with a concise, non-jargony explanation of what it is. You can't just assume.
When I saw someone mention the Favicon I went back and got it :) I think the problem I really had was that I read your "example" but it made no sense since I couldn't see any of the character boxes until I typed in the number of characters.
I've added a tagline now. I didn't have one before because before I launched it on a domain name I had a much more obvious name for the site which would need a tagline much less.
I've clearly learned something by all your feedback. It used to have a more obvious name before that I couldn't use because of domain name real estate. I had to change to Crosstips but didn't pad it with more explanation of what it does.
Plus having stared at it so much myself I got "home blind".
But most of the complaints say it needs to be more explicit because they didn't realize it was a crosswords tool, which inherently means they DID realize it was a crosswords tool.
I don't think it would be all that useful for scrabble. For that you would have to be able to input random letters and get words out.
I didn't, however, have any difficulty figuring out what the site was for (the name and the icon made it fairly clear I thought). The "crossword puzzle" metaphor could have been incorporated a bit more in the design, maybe.
Well, Google does not explain what their search is for; why should you have to? Considering it is a niche market for folks that want to solve crossword puzzles, and you had enough people talk about it with each other, you could keep the front page non-descriptive. It is a destination site that people will visit when they know about what it does.
I wouldn't want to see a slogan every time I visited the site, anyways.
