We’ve published multiple website design blogs on landing pages from the “rule of thirds” to landing pages 101. Now it’s time to create a more comprehensive blog post that pulls it all together with a video coming soon from Olivia … I promise!
Today we will break all major components of a great landing page:
While I think you already get the idea I’m going to go ahead an hammer away a little more at the purpose and importance of a landing page.
Let me save time and typing on my 1989 IBM Model M keyboard (hooked up to a super computer of course) and give you some stats:
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General Site Visitors
A landing page is a direct message to your site visitor on what you can deliver to them with an easy path to get there:
Turbulence could also be referred to as busy, ransom note, or confusing. The general guidelines for creating clean landing page are:
While the rule of thirds historically has been used in art and photography it is very applicable to great landing page design.
The rule of thirds isn’t supposed to be 100% applied in exact quadrants when designing your landing page. Instead use it as a tool tweaking and generally placing important images/objects appropriately:
The rule of thirds should behave as a guiding principle when putting together your design. You might choose to adjust components higher or lower than the grid intersections but in general near where they are supposed to be.
The call to action (CTA) prompts / gives incentive for the site visitor to take action of some sort:
The CTA is NOT filling out a contact us form or some generic name/phone/email “more information” form request. Contact Us will not bring in prospects.
Most site visitors do not want to call or even chat. If they are triggered to take action from your landing page they do want more information typically. The key is the form offers value back to them. A form requesting more information with a description of the request is useless and a sign of a bad website/landing page. The form should offer some combination of the following:
Don’t expect a generic form that is part of some sort of crappy build your own website will cut it. You’ll need a real website and form – if you’re planning on a DYI site then stop wasting your time reading this article because you’re website is already a failure.
Your landing page is … just that – the first thing a site visitor that searches for you should see. Landing pages are designed to load fast and deliver everything the site visitor needs to be emotionally triggered to make a decision without scrolling down or going to another page.
Historically the general rule of thumb for landing pages was the page would not let the visitor go to any other part of your site (so they didn’t get distracted). They provided the emotional reason to buy with a tiny bit of logic to back the visitors emotional decision. Times have changed as all modern landing pages are integrated into the website (usually the home page but not necessarily) and give the visitor the ability to scroll through the rest of your site to get more information if they need it to back their decision.
All landing pages should load fast. By loading I’m referring to the Real Use Monitoring (RUM) Index. RUM is the perceived loading time of the website as in when it first populates the critical components above the fold such as title/images/form.
For every second a landing page takes to load you lose about 22% of your visitors (or more depending on which study you subscribe to). It’s 2019 as I write this so don’t pay for a slow loading website. If your design company hands you a slug kick it back until it loads in the blink of an eye.
The bottom line is a landing page should give the site visitor what they want and answer the questions they have. The questions are:
Setup a free – no obligation appointment. Want to keep it in written form or chat only? No problem – many of our nerds aren’t great on the phone anyway.
