By Henry Brown
Landing pages are the equivalent of the shop front when it comes to potential clients landing on your website. Too cluttered, too much text and they’ll send your customer running to the hills (or to your competitor). Too boring and unengaging and it will have much the same effect.
Striking a balance between too much and too little is the key. You might have taken on a web developer to do the work for you, or you might be heading out on your own, taking advantage of the many build-your-own-website hosting companies out there. Either way, you’ll want to look at your landing page with a critical eye and look out for the following rookie mistakes.
Misalignment
Don’t even begin to design your landing page without a grid. With the best will in the world you will make mistakes and your images, text and video will look, well, wonky. It’s a small visual thing but something customers notice right away. If a website looks unprofessional, the implication is that the product or service offered there isn’t up to scratch either.
Image quality
Use images, lots of them but do make sure they are high quality. If you’re saving money then there are great quality, royalty-free stock photo providers out there. But if you are going to spend money on something, then good quality video production or photographs are well worth it.
Make sure your web hosting service can cope with uploading images quickly and doesn’t leave your website hanging. Be ruthless with how your images sit and crop if necessary. Don’t settle for anything that looks just okay; go for the best.
Think theme
Not all great websites look the same, but they do have elements in common that make them great. For a start look at theme: colors that complement each other and are featured all through every page of the site. The theme should quickly identify your brand and reflect your logo, packing stationery, email headers and footers and so on. Your theme should say a lot about who you are.
Try and avoid color backgrounds that make text hard to read or create a jumbled mess when viewed on a mobile phone rather than a laptop.
Mobile views
And speaking of mobile devices, business experts report that more and more of us are using our phones to carry out browsing on the go. We carry out our banking transactions on the phone, do our grocery shopping, and search for services, so your landing page should translate seamlessly between desktop computers and mobile device including phones and tablets.
It might seem like a lot to remember but we haven’t even got to the content of your text yet. Visually, however, this is what your clients see first and how they form their impressions of you and your business or service. Get the landing page right and you stand a far greater chance of them following through to more pages in your website. Get it wrong and they might not come back.
Do your research and create something your business deserves.
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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.
