Perfect Landing Pages

Following on from last weeks post on the Anatomy of a website, I thought you might appreciate the simplicity and elegance of this article breaking down the anatomy of a perfect landing page.

Landing pages are important. Although a landing page can be the home page as more and more traffic being driven by search, deep links are becoming ever more important.

Landing pages are real interaction points, points of transactions and forms, they are contextual and purposeful, but often forgotten.

A review of landing pages lists a number of elements that appeals best to the audience and need to be considered not just thrown out there.

Elements such as

· Headlines – Timely, Relevant and appropriate

· Body Copy – Backing up the claims from the headline

· Trust / Credibility symbols – reinforcing a sense of confidence

Are all very important and can’t be overlooked but the stand out one for me is the one that is to my eye most often missing

· Call to action – what do you want the user to do?

All too often when looking at proposed sites or existing ones, it is hard to understand exactly what the site is about and what they want me to do.

A web site is not just a collection of pages or a standalone isolated 1 way communication but it should be part of the evolving business, reinforcing core business goals. Everything from timely and contextual information to reducing call centre traffic, increasing sign ups, bookings or inquires.

If you…

· present too much information,

· fail to make the page clear

· fail to offer a simple yet powerful search experience

… you will never be able to help the users get what they want and ultimately you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to increase revenue and reduce costs.

Remember users are rarely looking at what can be found on a home page, they are after information usually related to key products or services and this is the same for B2C, B2B or Public Sector digital channels and getting the pertinent (from the users point of view) information is key.

SharePoint 2010 & FAST makes it particularly easy to regain control, monitor and update such information

WCM

– editing as if you were in word with all the power of drag and drop for rich media, styles and images

– taking advantage of templates and lists with branding and styling under the control of the digital design team

– simple but powerful workflows integrated throughout the organisation via office and exchange

– putting embargos and reminders so that content is put up, taken down and refreshed easily and as part of routine rather than the exception

Digital Assets

– able to ensure that editors only have access to approved images

– but with full control over them – resizing, streaming, thumbnails all done automatically

Search

– not only the best search software in the world but some of the easiest to blend with business or marketing rules

– drive users using visual best bets, recommendations, auto complete and a host of linguistic and business tools

– power to create dynamic topic pages