disclaimer: I work for Bitovi, and I'm a CanJS core comitter
Short answer: yes, people do build real apps with these frameworks.
I stumbled upon JavaScriptMVC (CanJS was extracted from JMVC) 4 years ago when I was building application with a lot of front end code, I think we had around 10k lines of JavaScript in various modules. Trying to build something like that without a framework was a huge pain, and JMVC helped here a lot.
In last few years (after I started working for Bitovi) I worked on pretty big enterprise level applications, and besides being able to build things in cleaner way, a huge plus was ability to allow less experienced developers (from the companies we did consulting for) to implement stuff with familiar structure and without needing to care about memory leaks, zombie events and similar stuff.
IMO CanJS is the best framework currently available, but I'm extremely biased. In the end I don't think it matters which framework people choose because they will get a lot of value just by using any of them.
That said, I would never again use a DOM-centric approach for frontend apps. Live binding is a huge game changer and data centric apps are (in my experience) less buggy and get stuff done with less code.
Why? CanJS' codebase is extracted from JavaScriptMVC which is ~5 years old and used on a lot of big codebases. It did go through a lot of changes but every change was made because of the real-world-need.
I commented on your blog too, but I just want to let you know that I've pushed a quick fix for the mobile browsers, and I'm looking into making a proper mobile version now. Thanks for reporting this.
I would try to join martial arts class. Stuff like brazilian jiu jitsu force you to be close (in proximity) to other people. When you train in pair, and change your training partners few times per training session you're forced to connect with people.
I had this problem (although in pretty mild variant) before I started to train. And the best part is that you can take it slow if you want. You can just introduce yourself and focus on the technique, and after few sessions you will start to talk to people, and maybe even connect with some of them.
I still get anxious when I come to the new club, but it lasts shorter every time.
One note: You should show tweet form on click. It uses unnecessary space, and there was duplication when form is shown below the logo and link is shown above the logo.
Can you please send me some screenshots of problematic pages to my mail (konjevic at gmail com). I've created account, but honestly I don't understand anything about your app, and it would be great to see how layout looks with data.
I'm not expert on landing page optimization, but there are few things that will surely help.
1. Remove animation on frontpage. As you said, your customer want to know how it works and how much does it cost. Leave only how it works slide.
2. Add call to action
3. Create FAQ page where people can read about your service and put very visible link on frontpage.
I created a mockup of this solution and you can find it at http://212labs.com/retro/longlongago.png . I think this should already help with bigger conversion, but you should probably do some A/B testing to find right formula for your customers.
Unfortunately this is beyond scope of this offer. I can help you with one screen that you are not satisfied with, but design of application takes a lot of time.
roryokane identified much of the issues with the current design. Here you can see greybox mockup of new design http://212labs.com/retro/appadvocate.png. It has clear hierarchy of options, and they are clearly separated. I believe this is a better layout for this screen. Also I'm not sure about orange icons on brown background. I would add some contrast.
note: I'm the author of Penkala