Image is Everything

I have noticed a strange trend lately with a lot of landing pages. Many people are starting to understand the importance of them and hence are doing whatever they can to make room in their budget for them. And it’s probably these tight restrictions and cheap marketing heads that haven’t been sold on it correctly have ended up creating in some really sloppy implementations of a “conversion friendly” landing page. So this post aims to outline what you should really doing as regards the design of your home page.

The Header

Please whatever you do, do not use plain, run of the mill iStock photos in this location. The last thing you want people do is associate your webpage with the 500 other pages on the web using the same photo of the girls writing with a whiteboard marker.

It needs to be branded. It needs to be unique. It needs to get the point across.

In fact, can we make it a rule that no iStock images without modification be used on any of your personal or client’s websites. Especially those little white bubble men with the red pen.

If you are a service based industry, you definitely want your phone number large bold and prominent so those that do not want to read or email can at least call immediately. Your internal sales people should be able to take it from there.

Pictures of Product & Offer

You would be surprised (once again im guessing due to time and budget constraints how many landing pages exist out there without a high quality and reasonably sized image of the product or the service on offer. Once again, iStock wont do here either.

The website industry recognises this so much that often their digital products are often drawn and portrayed as coming in a box to help the visitor associate the fact that it is a tangible product.

The starburst button should have the product feature or competitive advantage or discount offer – ideally on the right hand side as that is widely accepted as the best position for it.

Do not attempt to cross sell or upsell on this page, that should not be the job of the landing page. It’s primary goal is to solve the problem mentioned in the ad or keyword search. If you start distracting them, you can kiss the original purpose goodbye.

Don’t Make it a Visual Avalanche

So so so many pages try to cram every last detail about the product/service into the page it looks like someone vomited sales speak and images in the hope that in the spread something will stick. Whitespace is your friend, and your designer should have the ability to determine when too much is literally too much. Talk to your designer about it, they will definitely have an opinion on it.