July 3, 2016

A Few Things I’ve Learned While Designing Landing Pages

Business and Entrepreneurship, Daily Writing Blog

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A Few Things I’ve Learned While Designing Landing Pages (As A Complete Newbie)

This morning, I finished a monumental task that took me over a month: I wrote the content for about nine-hundred pages. This was the new project I’ve talked about for the past few days.

As part of this new project, I’ve bought myself a visual content editor and I plan on teaching myself how to design really nice-looking landing pages.

I have a flaw: I automatically think I’m going to be able to do anything on a first try. Landing page design was one of those things. I thought I was going to be able to make great looking pages without having to learn the ropes or anything. I was wrong.

I’m still a design amateur, but here are a few tips that I thought I could share for fellow amateurs:

Designing Landing Pages: What To Do

Get all your content ready first.

The last thing you want to be doing is anything other than copying and pasting whilst you’re also trying to work out which text box goes in a particular place and which images go where… which brings me on to the next point.

Get all your images ready first.

On a lot of landing pages, splash pages and other pages, there are a lot more images than you’d think – they’re subconscious until you’re designing landing pages and wondering why they look so long and boring. You need images, if only to break the monotony of words-on-page.

Draw your page out on paper.

I wish I’d done this. It’s really hard to get an overview of what your page will look like when you’re bouncing between tabs and you’re scrolling up and down. Take a landing page you like, then draw it on paper so you can see the whole structure on a single sheet… you’ll thank yourself when you’re designing landing pages of your own.

 

Designing pages: What Not To Do

Don’t go colour mad.

My landing page currently looks like a Lego castle. On a lot of sales pages, you’ll see a lot of block colours in the variations backgrounds of different sections. It is very easy to overdo this. It’s much better to pick a single colour and use different variations of this (in combination with off-white.) Again, check out some good landing pages to see where you’re going wrong.

Don’t try and wing it.

This is going to be one of those habits that haunts me forever. I always think I can just improvise and everything will go well. Generally I don’t have any catastrophes, but when you’re talking about designing web pages, slight things can be the difference between a 2% and 3% conversion rate. Don’t improvise, plan ahead.

Don’t do anything more than once – save every template, every bit of code, every design.

There is nothing more annoying than creating a table, template or finding a great looking font only to have to do it over and over again.

Just like you’ve got a swipe file with all your favourite copywriters in, you should have a folder where your designs and html codes and whatnot live. It’s a pain to press the save button and copy and paste, but you’ll thank yourself.

Don’t build a landing page without your call to action firmly decided.

My content said I should fill out a form at the end of the landing page. But when designing landing pages, I realised that they looked terrible with a contact form/opt-in. Instead, I’ve opted for a button.

Changing this one thing is going to cause me hours of extra work as I sit and correct each article.

Your call to action is the most important part of any sales page, because without it, you’re just wasting your time. If you’re designing a specific call to action that relies on more than words, then you need to make sure you get both the words and the design to correlate.

 

More on this to come when I’m less of a design idiot.

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