Going live today are thousands of landing pages. You know those pages when you click on a link from an email that you receive, or a “sponsored list”/ad from a website or search engine. Many of these landing pages will be well done, but others will not.
Today we will look at one example of a landing page that is going live today, to give you an idea of what to look for in a good landing page.
- This page loads fast! In fact, in our testing it displays under a half a second, and is finished loading in 0.8 to 1.1 seconds. Since people will judge your page in under two seconds, we looked at many tweaks to get the page loaded in a quick time.
- It has a Strong leading line. Starting with a question is a good way to get people to recognize it, and continue reading.
- Strong photos highlight what the page is about. To load them faster, a Flash image slideshow tool is used.
- It reads easy. We made sure that the text was easy to read so that readers would not have to stop and think about what they were reading. This is the same reason why your average newspaper article is written at a 7th grade level.
- Good call to action. We make it easy for people to know how to contact the company. We even provide to easy methods (phone and online form). Even better, our online form will let us know where they came from.
- Lack of navigation. We don’t want to make the page easy to leave from, except through our form, so the main navigation was removed so we don’t lose the focus of our other pages.
We tweaked the headline and text on the page, but we will never know how good it does, until the page goes live. The good news is that we have an idea of how well it will preform soon. The better news is we can actually optimize the page by testing different headlines, images, text, and calls to action…and any good landing page will constantly be testing to try to improve its conversion rate.
About Walter Wimberly