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Checklist for Creating a Landing Page
- ajjuliani 14y agoI put up a landing page and "Showed HN" a few weeks ago created on unbounce. The general thought was that it seemed spammy. Yet, many of the items on the checklist were covered...what gives?
- narcissus 14y agoIs it possible that Unbounce landing pages themselves are considered spammy? You're asking "I followed most of Unbounce's advice when I created a page with Unbounce... why did it fail?" before asking "is Unbounce's advice correct in the first place?" I don't know the answer either way, to be completely honest, but my personal view is that that particular style of landing page gives the notion that "this site is such a new idea in my head that I haven't even begun it!". That's my opinion, anyway.
- kaolinite 14y agoI don't know the answer either way, to be completely honest, but my personal view is that that particular style of landing page gives the notion that "this site is such a new idea in my head that I haven't even begun it!". That's my opinion, anyway. I feel like that in relation to LaunchRock pages now that so many throwaway projects are using it. Same feeling I get from unthemed Bootstrap sites too.
- mintplant 14y agoProbably because all you're "Showing HN" is a landing page, not something you've actually built.
- mnicole 14y agoJudging by their "examples" pages, these all look really cheap and tacky. If yours was anything like it, that's the reason I wouldn't sign up. Design might take a backseat on other pages, but you can't afford not to have a professional/trustworthy-looking sign up/landing/features page.
- tgrass 14y agoLooking spammy does not make it spam. And all that matters it that is converts.
- Skywing 14y agoYou can follow all the checklists in the world, but it still boils down to passing the eye ball test. Just a simple test of judgement as to whether or not something looks/is high quality or not. This is the test that your visitors will be using, anyway.
- tnorthcutt 14y agoThe general thought was that it seemed spammy. Just because the general thought on HN is that something seems spammy, doesn't mean it is. Focus on results, not the emotional feelings of people who may not even be your audience.
- nvr219 14y agoI think this is a great list. But just because you follow the list doesn't mean you won't look like a spammer. This is not an attack on ajjuliani.
- jbigelow76 14y agoSpamming usually means bombarding some communication channel, email or craigslist for example, with advertisements or deceptive links to get a visitor to your landing page. It's all about what happens prior to seeing the LP. Once the visitor is on the landing page they are "post-spammed" (if they were even spammed at all, not all advertisement is spam). Proper landing page design has zero to do with spamming.
- davidcelis 14y ago"If the counter isn’t going up when you check all those boxes, give the page a refresh. It’s finicky." Mere words cannot express the emotions that reading this made me feel.
- sergiotapia 14y agoIt seems a simple script to tally all `:checked` elements using jQuery is too much for this blog to handle.
- talmand 14y agoThe javascript involved does seem overly complicated for such a simple task. Maybe it was originally intended for something else and somehow found its way onto this page?
- skeletonjelly 14y agoFor anyone reading: http://unbounce.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/themes/unbounce2/js/scorecard-ultimate-lpo.js http://unbounce.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/themes/un...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- skeletonjelly 14y agoCan't seem to edit my comment. Anyone know why? Anyway somebody asked me how to do it, but delete their comment. Paste this into your console, they already have jQuery loaded. jQuery('.blog-post input').change(function() { console.log("Score: " + jQuery('.blog-post input:checked').length + "/50"); });
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danso 14y agoToo many of these items are redundant...variations of saying "Is your message clear?" I guess some startup creators need that question drilled into their head? But the main issue of this checklist is that its items are too broad in scope and too subjective...The bullet points of a checklist should be concise and easy to answer with "yes" or "no". I'm thinking along the lines of the famous hospital checklists written about by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_... The checklist is not full of items like: "Does the patient seem healthy?", "Is the patient overly nervous?" "Do you feel well-rested?", but "Did you wash your hands?" "Are you wearing a sterile mask?" "Did you apply antispetic onto the patient's skin?"
- shurane 14y agoSo less on vague questions that need some thought and more on concrete details that can be easily checked/fixed. Yeah, the questions on unbounce are a bit too wordy.
- salimmadjd 14y agoOnly if the post followed it's own checklist. I get this is not a landing page with the intent of capturing new users. But it kind of is. I think the page layout is funky (I can undertand it's a template), the paragraph's are too long and the actual list is below the fold. So if you're going to tell the world how to do a landing page, then show by example.
- lrem 14y ago> Have you optimized your landing page to get a paid search quality score above 7? Anyone can explain this? What's the "paid search quality score"?
- melg 14y ago"Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing page are to a person seeing your ad." http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=2454010 http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&... It only matters if you promote a page via Google Adwords.
- riffraff 14y agobing has the same thing, I'd guess it's common.
- systemtrigger 14y agoBetter yet, 86 the landing page entirely. Build web technology that doesn't need an artifice on top of it to dramatize itself. The product is the thing.
- tajddin 14y agoI don't know if that works for all types of products, though. Some, perhaps, but not all. A B2B landing page, for example, needs to be able to convey the benefits of using the product, solutions, etc.
- danielweber 14y agoMany times on HN someone will show off their thing, and I have no clue what it does. (I found the best way to deal with this is to simply suggest they make it easier.)
- myared 14y agoThe product is the thing, and the product can be viewed differently to different people in different regions with different motivations. A landing page shouldn't dramatize anything. Businesses need landing pages to allow for segmentation and to continually refine your message based on the audience. I have yet to come across a marketing agency that recommends against the use of landing pages.
- bdavisx 14y agoLanding pages are the "salesperson (or salespeople, sometimes it makes sense to have multiple)" for the product. They are absolutely needed in some form or another for a large majority of products - "products" that many of us are interested in don't need them as much, we've heard enough about them elsewhere to know we at least want to take a test drive. The majority of the web population isn't like that. They need to be convinced to take that test drive. The landing page can be a "used car salesperson" kind of page (and I generally hate those, but they work for a lot of types of products) or a "soft sell informational" kind of page; either way, they need to have good closes and other hooks. The difference between a good and bad landing page is the difference between success and failure.
- 14y ago
- jplata 14y agoAre people really paying $50-$200/month for landing page testing and optimization? I get that there appears to be a lot of features, but seems like overkill to me.
- graeme 14y agoIf it produces a benefit, that cost is trivial for any business with a reasonable amount of sales. 1% boost in conversion in a business with $100,000 annual sales = $1000, which is almost double the price of the lowest plan.
- hayksaakian 14y agoIts not an artifact that's intuitive to me either, but the numbers shown that good landing pages drive conversions.
- joey_muller 14y agoYes. In fact we have an agency account which costs a bit more. We use it all the time for a roster of folks who don't want to pay the monthly fee but are interested in improving conversion rates.
- purplelobster 14y agoWhat I don't understand is why some services don't just show off the product right away, instead of showing a landing page. This is obviously not applicable to everything but in many cases I don't want to see your polished pitch, have to input my email and sometimes phone and address. I just want to see what it is and what I can do with it. Just as an example, let's say I've built an amazing email client, even better than gmail. Why not make the landing page an actual email account with fake data? Or at least give the user a small piece of info, a button for logging in, and a button straight to said demo?
- state 14y agoI agree with this completely. I don't care about how you think about your product, I care about what your product is. Why am I so often tasked with the work of wading through all fifty of these bullet points someone tried to mash in to a single page instead of simply seeing what the thing does?
- jamesbritt 14y agoWhen I see a page like that my first thought is, "Oh, it's not ready."
- talmand 14y agoLanding pages that work that way are most likely intended for lead generation. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes not.
- mkr-hn 14y agoLanding pages are done the way they're done because that's how they've always been done. People implement and recite the same bits of {marketing,programming,writing,...} advice they heard and vaguely understood years ago, never giving it a critical look.
- rhizome 14y agoDegradability would probably be a good feature to have as well. It's a NoScript/Ghostery/RequestPolicy world. http://imgur.com/d2q3s http://imgur.com/d2q3s
- nacs 14y agoCertainly not a "NoScript/Ghostery/RequestPolicy world" unless you are around a lot of techy types (and even then most don't disable Javascript). I always design with degradability when doing anything that requires Javascript but there are numerous, very popular sites nowadays that don't work at all without Javascript.
- rhizome 14y agothere are numerous, very popular sites nowadays that don't work at all without Javascript. Right: everybody's doing it. This is a technical debt that may come due in the future if/when javascript bugs cause more problems than they have in the past, as well as when/whether a site comes under (US) ADA scrutiny. It certainly doesn't cover the entire possible user pool for these sites, but minimizing "techy types" in an HN comment seems a little colorblind.
- Silhouette 14y agoIt's a NoScript/Ghostery/RequestPolicy world. Sorry, but no, it isn't. Whether it's building their own PCs or running a custom Linux kernel or installing privacy utilities or using three factor authentication with a telepathic failsafe for their security system, geeks tend to vastly overrate their collective importance. In reality, they tend to represent tiny fractions of any market that isn't specifically built around geeks by its nature. Most people aren't like geeks. Now, suppose your new interactive web app doesn't offer a good user experience without things like JavaScript. Maybe you could make it work up to a point, but realistically it's never going to be a polished presentation or do everything the full app could. Now put yourself in management's position, considering the cost/benefit of implementing a second-rate fallback vs. allocating the same time and resources to improving the core experience for almost everyone. Can you imagine how little they care about geeks who deliberately nerf their own browsers in a way that means they couldn't use that service anyway and therefore aren't likely to pay the service provider money either? (Edit: Incidentally, people in glass houses etc. Your own web site's home page, under the amusingly ironic headline "passenger: Rails deployment that just works", appears to be doing anything but working. HTH.)
- BasDirks 14y ago+ Is your page accessible to those with disability? + Is your markup/CSS/JS correct? (especially when selling your idea to a tech crowd)
- kcwebz 14y agoThis section resonates with me so much "Interface iteration is more cumbersome", I am currently working on a project where I have begged and pleaded to get some type of overall app design/workflow... only to have that idea thrown out and every other week having to deal with design changes that means I have to fix several views worth of work.. needless to say its a very depressing time in my life.
- hayksaakian 14y ago'And finally, have you ever used Unbounce? (Had to ask).' Really? This makes it difficult to take the list seriously; when that is weighted the same as 'Is it clear who your company is and what you do? (a logo and tagline)?'
- mneumegen 14y agoHow about doing some sort of usability testing on the landing page? It might be a bit scary putting infront of a REAL customer.
- joey_muller 14y agoCustom headline + no navigation menu + big call to action = big conversion rate!