5 Tips for Designing the Ultimate Landing Page

In this post on the Copyblogger blog, Roberta Rosenberg give 5 tips for designing a landing page.

The web is a strongly visual medium, she says. Good design helps support the content, leading the visitor’s eye from here to there and directing them through your message layer by layer, step by step. This is especially so in the formatting of an effective landing page.

Basic guidelines:

• Scrutinize your competition’s design and organization flow of their landing pages: Go through their conversation process and note the places where you feel a bit stumped or put off. Then go back to your own landing page and compare. Consider what you could revise or eliminate for better effect.
• Put your most critical landing page elements in the upper 300 pixels of the page: Usability research shows over half of your site visitors will NOT scroll “below the fold.” So forget the warm-up copy, get right to the point, and keep your value proposition at first screen view.
• Think simple: Use a one-column format with ample margins and white space to increase reading comprehension. Break up big paragraphs into smaller paragraphs — and no more than 5 lines per. You want to encourage visitors to read and engage with your message. Dense-looking copy doesn’t get read, period.
• Be obvious and use standard usage conventions: Underline your links, be clear. descriptive and specific when describing them. No visitor should have to work to use your page or understand your message.
• Make sure your page loads quickly: There are still millions of people using dial-up. Depending on your marketing and your product/service mix, strive for an 8-second or less page load. Don’t plump your page with unnecessary graphics. Optimize essential graphics to reduce file size and load time.

Roberta also offers 5 more tips you’ll want to review and keep handy:

• Format your page according to the F-Pattern Eye-Tracking Principle: Web readers tend to track through content in a rough F-shaped pattern. So format important images flush left. (For more on this, see Jakob Nielsen’s eyetracking research.
• Use the same color palette/visual elements from your ads on your landing page: There should be a smooth, consistent flow to help keep your prospect oriented and assured that they are indeed “landed” in the right place.
• No clipart! Choose a single dominant photo image to be your hero shot: Use a product photo or, in the case of a service, you could use your logo or even a photo of your location. Make it clickable and don’t forget to add a benefit-rich caption.
• Put your message, copy or image, close to the middle of your page. Less critical elements can be placed in sidebars or perhaps even eliminated.
• Make it easy to complete your input form: For example, have the input cursor hop instantly from field to field upon completion. Let your user tab around fields. No drop-down menus, require only a checkbox action. And my personal favorite — auto-populate any fields you can.

Comments

[JT Gillett]

Excellent tips!

Every aspect of landing page design should focus on the action you want visitors to take...Create an easy path to your offer, reduce unnecessary elements and eye candy...Make sure headlines and subheads make it easy for visitors to skim your page and quickly learn how to get to the offer.

[Business Education]

As you mention above, Usability research shows over half of your site visitors will NOT scroll “below the fold.”

I know many people don't to scroll down the page. however it is depend how interesting the heading really are. If visitor feel necessary to read more they will scroll down the page.

Many marketing guru I know use very long sales copy and they can succeed to make visitor to scroll down the page.

To make page load quickly also can use css instead of table.

[Kevin Garber]

A great summary, thanks.

We work with our clients on many landing pages.

One thing that often gets neglected is the "thank you" page after forms have been completed.

This is a *very* strong page. Your recipients have entered details and submitted - you have them engaged, don't waste the opportunity.

I am amazed at how many people just put "Thank you for your information it has been received." What a waste! Upsell, cross-sell, push people to other web pages.

I agree that auto populating helps a lot, and is quite easy to do with a decent ems and / or scripts.

Kevin Garber - Melon Media
http://www.melon.com.au

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Tamara: I totally agree with you. The thank-you page shouldn't just say "thank you" but it should offer more items that the prospect/customer might want. They are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Eg. when they downloaded a white paper, offer them a link to a product demo or to a webinar on the same topic. When they just bought a digital camera, offer some accessories like memory cards etc. According to Anne Holland, 39% of all visitors to one of the MarketingSherpa thank-you pages had taken advantage of another offer on that thank-you page...