Saturday, January 14, 2017

How to Plan Website Landing Page Design

Every landing page design tutorial for a small business website design will provide some basic places to start: planning steps, SEO tips, keyword suggestions, and suggestions for which design elements lead to the highest click-through rate. It can be especially overwhelming when you look at galleries of 30-50 perfect landing pages. Where does a website designer begin with planning a successful landing page?

Determine Your Landing Page Focus

The place to start with a landing page is to focus on a specific action related to a specific result. You can’t design your page unless you determine whether you want website visitors to sign up for a mailing list or to purchase a product. If you’re selling a product, then you need to provide sales numbers, endorsements, a special discount, and possibly even a video demonstrating your product.

On the other hand, building a mailing list requires a very different kind of landing page. You’ll need to focus on presenting details that drive home the reasons to belong to your list such as the number of subscribers, the free gift for subscribers, discounts for subscribers, and unique industry insights that only you can provide.

Frame Your Landing Page

Once you have a focus in mind for your landing page, you can move on to framing your website with a  collaborative website design tool called Mockingbird. Mockingbird provides simple website frames that you can build and modify without having to set all of your coding in stone or even build a website in the first place. The drag and drop functionality makes it easy to add elements to your website landing page mockup and then test out which work the best.

If you need to do some split tests of your landing page, something every expert recommends, then you will especially want to look into several variations of your landing page. Mockingbird makes preparing for these tests especially easy since you can develop a couple different versions and tweak each of them based on your results over time.

Mockingbird provides a simple grid layout that easily integrates various text sizes and media elements such as videos and pictures. You’ll have a clear sense of how to lay out your website before you add a single bit of code to your HTML document. In addition, Mockingbird provides a series of common website elements that you can drop right into your website mockup.

Advantages of Mockingbird

Mockingbird is a fully web-based website design tool, so you’ll never have to worry about being unable to access your work when you’re in a variety of locations. This also makes it extremely easy to invite several collaborators to your website project.

If you need to share your mockup with a client, you can export your design as an image or as a pdf file that is easily emailed to everyone with a stake in the project. Edits and overhauls are easily done by resetting your design or dragging and dropping various elements around your design.

The Cost of Mockingbird

Mockingbird isn’t free, but none of the landing page design tools around are free. The least expensive option is $9 per month, which will quickly pay for itself if you need to work with collaborators in different locations.

While Mockingbird provides a very basic service for designers, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the design process and streamlines the process of working with colleagues in multiple locations. You can test out Mockingbird on the cheap and then determine whether it is the best solution for your website design process.

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