From promoting your latest lead magnet to getting people to register for your webinar, or promoting your product or service, a landing page is an effective way to achieve your goals. Landing pages can make a huge difference in the success of your launch.

Free landing page templates are an excellent option if you’re looking to create a landing page quickly and efficiently. With these templates, you can focus on the message and strategy while leaving the design to the experts.

The free landing page Photoshop PSD templates we have for you today will give you a great starting point by offering a pre-designed framework for creating your web page quickly. All of the PSD templates are fully customizable, so you can quickly adapt them to your brand and message.

The post 10 Free Landing Page Web Templates for Photoshop appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Using WordPress landing page themes can make the process of creating and testing landing pages easier and more efficient. With pre-designed templates and customizable features, you can quickly create landing pages that fit your branding and marketing goals.

Our curated collection of the best landing page WordPress themes will help you better convert visitors into subscribers and customers. From customizable templates to built-in optimization features, these themes maximize conversions. Start creating high-converting landing pages with our collection today!

The post The 10 Best Free Landing Page Themes for WordPress appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The average person may think that all landing pages do is capture email addresses, but that’s not the case. Landing pages may also be used to facilitate downloads, persuade visitors to subscribe to newsletters, show videos, pitch sales, upsell existing customers, or offer other navigational options.

Technically, any web page that’s being used as the go-to destination for advertising and SEO can be classified as a landing page. This is particularly true in multi-channel marketing where different promotional avenues may require different configurations and styles of landing pages that are best fitted to receive the kind of traffic that each channel pushes.

Optimizing a Landing Page

Advertising and SEO aren’t enough to turn visits into qualified leads. Most of the time, marketers have to do varying levels of optimization to make sure the pages get good visibility while serving up good user experiences that encourage conversions. Here are nine steps to optimize a landing page for various promotional channels:

1. Determine the Landing Page’s Purpose

The first step in creating a functional landing page is deciding what it’s for. Are you using it to generate leads? Perhaps to pitch a sale? Whatever it is, the purpose has to be solitary and focused. Trying to get a visitor to do more than one thing usually leads to confusion and failure.

The landing page’s purpose sets the tone for everything from its headline to the body text and right down to its call to action. Keep in mind that Internet browsing attention span is short and volatile. If you bore or confuse your audience, your conversion rate suffers. Keep the messaging simple and united at all times.

2. Identify and Set the Value Proposition

In marketing, it’s never about you and what you want. It’s always about what’s in it for the target audience and how you can leverage that to get what you want in the process. That principle applies strongly to landing pages. It’s never about you, your mailing list or your sales figures. It’s always about the perceived value that your audience will get from absorbing your content and heeding your call to action.

When writing the copy, make the promise explicit every step of the way. Tell the reader how your offering either increases their pleasures or takes away their pains. Write about that in the opening paragraph and make it lead nicely to the benefit statement. Underscore your offers other benefits by enumerating them in short but impactful bullet points. Lastly, make it clear that your audience can only help you fulfill your promise by taking on your call to action.

3. Create at Least Two of Each Element

Landing page design and copywriting aren’t the most exact of sciences. You may have every reason to think that one headline or color scheme is better than another, but the majority of your audience could think otherwise. For that reason, testing is an essential part of landing page optimization. It provides empirical data straight from the field that helps you assess which parts of your landing page are working and which ones need to be improved.

Practically anything in a landing page can be tested. Headlines, buttons, calls-to-action and color palettes can be exposed to a sample set of the audience to gauge visitor responses. Tools such as Google Analytics can streamline the process and help you crunch the numbers for accurate result analysis.

There are two main types of testing used in landing page optimization: A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the type that switches out singular landing page elements to see which one performs better. Multivariate tests, on the other hand, are experiments that measure which combination of elements performs best.

4. Determine Where the Page Fold is

In newspaper parlance, the fold is the not-so-imaginary line separating the top half from the bottom half of a broadsheet. The most important headlines, images, and news stories are placed above the fold while everything else is positioned below it.

We may be in a day and age where news publications have gone online and folds no longer exist as we knew them, but they go on in a different form. As far as web pages go, “above the fold” pertains to the area that’s immediately visible when the page fully loads. This area is prime online real estate and it will determine whether or not the majority of your audience will stay and scroll down.

Having said that, it’s crucial for a landing page to position vital elements such as the headline and important images above the fold. The promise of value has to be sensed by the audience within a few seconds and without scrolling down.

Granted, users will vary in devices and screen resolution preferences which means the fold may vary from person to person. However, you can compensate for that by planning for what the majority will use. For desktop devices, it’s a safe bet to assume that the average screen resolution will be 1600×900 or close variants of that.

Smartphones and tablets may have totally different display specifications and you’ll want to cater for them with either mobile-friendly counterparts of your landing pages or well-planned responsive webpages that scale down accurately to the devices viewing them.

5. Apply Basic SEO

Search engine traffic is still the best driver of qualified visitors to a landing page. Make sure to use keywords in important elements such as title tags, header tags, image alternate text and body copy. Make sure you use canonical URLs and if you can direct some internal and external links to the landing page, by all means do so.

Even when you’re not relying on organic search traffic to feed visitors to your landing page, you should still apply these optimizations. Title tags and meta descriptions display prominently when your landing page URL is shared on social media. PPC bots also crawl landing pages and award relevance points when these important SEO elements are filled in accurately. Basic SEO doesn’t require a lot of effort but it will reward your landing page in more ways than one.

6. Make Sure It’s Mobile-Friendly

By the end of 2014, it was reported that mobile Internet use has officially surpassed desktop usage. This is a huge development and the trend seems to only be getting started.

The mobile web is a big, open market and early adopters are bound to be rewarded. If you want to tap the latest evolution of the Internet as we know it, it’s in your best interest to make your landing pages mobile-friendly.

7. Remove Unnecessary Links

Think of links within your landing page as exit routes. The more of them you have, the greater the chances that visitors will wander off somewhere and never come back. To maximize your conversion rate, it’s usually best to have only one clickable item: the call-to-action button. This helps you funnel your traffic more easily towards the kind of user action that results in the fulfilment of your conversion goals.

Links aren’t bad per se, but make sure you absolutely have to have them before you place them on the landing page. Examples of these links are the ones leading to your privacy policy and terms of use. Just make sure they’re set up to open in new tabs or windows so you don’t end up pulling visitors away from the landing page itself.

8. Add Social Proof

Social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people assume that the actions and thoughts of others is the correct one. More often than not, adding elements of social proof to a landing page helps increase conversion rates by reducing the audience’s perception of risk.

By that token, badges, testimonials and statistics help you build a better case for your call to action. Social proof widgets are usually placed either on the sidebars or the bottom part of the landing page. They’re completely optional but they’re great to have whenever you can get hold of them.

9. Track it All with Analytics

No matter how good your landing page does when you launch it, there’s always room for you to improve it en route to better conversion rates. Track it with Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms and monitor key metrics such as bounce rates, average times on the page and conversion rates.

This will help you measure user engagement and understand visitor behavior. It will also shed insights on whether or not you need to make adjustments in order to get the most out of the page and the promotions you’re doing.

Finished

Using landing pages for multichannel marketing isn’t the most exact of sciences and it needs constant testing with corresponding adjustments to yield the best results. Keep refining your craft and better traction won’t be far behind.

The post How to Optimize Landing Pages for Multichannel Marketing appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Creating something quickly without compromising on quality can be a challenge. Creating a CSS & HTML website from scratch can often yield exceptional results. But that approach would take some time.

Slides offers a different approach for web designers and developers. It’s the right approach when you need to create an outstanding website and do so in a very short time.

1.0 So, What is Slides?

The first thing you’ll notice about Slides is that it isn’t like any website builder you may have used in the past. For starters, it lets you customize your design as you are creating it.

Building a website is easy. Pick your slides, add panels, and select a navigation approach. Then, choose styles and website settings, and hit download.

If further customizing is in order, you can open the HTML file and edit it to get the code features you need.

You can rest assured your finished design reflects the latest design trends. It will be totally responsive and will feature the typography your client is looking for. Slides’ latest version features a host of improvements. You’ll find them here.

2.0 Slides Main Features

Slide’s heart and soul is its powerful Generator. This is the tool that enables you to create an amazing website in mere minutes. You can create a website that is responsive and retina-ready. It can also feature a clever use of animation.

It’s not hard to create a Beautiful Design. It’s simply a matter of choosing from 180+ beautiful slides. Combine them to build the website you and your client has in mind.

Slides is Developer Friendly. Very few website builders on the market today can make that statement. Development is especially easy – the important stuff a developer needs is built in. It is also easily customizable.

Do you like building with modules? Most designers and developers do. The Slides framework comes with a nice selection of Built-in Modules.

Do not forget about popular Integrations Slides offers. Thanks to numerous great integrations, such as Intercom, MailChimp, Typeform, Google Maps, Soundcloud, you ll be at the top of the game.

3.0 Using Slides

From the time you first start using the Generator it will start saving you hours of work. You’ll quickly come to appreciate how easy this intuitive tool is to work with. But in the off-chance you get stuck there’s an icon you can quick on for links to the user manual. It will also show you site templates, and a set of website building examples.

Choosing Your Slides is the first step toward creating a dream website for your client. You have an abundance of slides at your disposal. Thus, you can use the filtering menu to quickly drill down to the ones you would like to work with.

Once you choose the slides you want, you can duplicate them, or delete them. You can also change their style to reflect a minimalist approach at the click of a button. If you need to change the order, it’s simply a matter of drag and drop.

Animation can add a great deal to a site’s UX, and Slides offers an excellent choice of animations to select from. Each slide has its own animation style, but you can click to any other style if you decide to make a change. Once you have your slides and animations in order, it’s time to select effects settings. This involves nothing more than clicking a few buttons.

The next task is Choosing the Panels. This is where the need for excellent navigation begins to come into play. There are plenty of top panels or headers to select from, and footer panels as well. It’s simply a matter of previewing a panel, choosing the settings, and copying its code or adding it in the HTML.

Like everything else about Slides, Choosing Navigation is easy and straightforward. You can choose between dots or arrows to navigate through your slides. Zero navigation is also an option. In any event, the settings are in place to customize navigation the way you want to for the slides you’re using.

The Setting the Styles feature will be a pleasant surprise. This is if you’re familiar with Slides’ previous versions. If you’re not, it will still be a pleasant surprise. This totally new feature allows you to select from a set of pre-defined typography styles. It can give your website the look and feel you want. You can set a custom style with the Google Fonts a client may use and prefer.

Downloading Your Completed HTML Template is all that’s left for you to do. This is where you can add a client’s choice of images and colors before uploading to the live website.

If the above steps seem ridiculously simple to follow, it isn’t because of any attempt to make them seem that way. They actually are that easy to follow. This is but one reason you should consider trying Slides today.

Why You Should Try Slides Now

Before reading about the key reasons why you should use Slides, take a look at this video with the static site generator in action:

It is very easy to follow a straightforward series of website-building steps. This comes as one of many reasons for giving Slides a try. Here are the others:

• Slides makes it easy to create visually stunning, professional-looking presentation pages and websites.
• This advanced static website builder is lightning fast easy to use. You can have a website up and running in far less time than is possible if you choose using WordPress.
• Slides’ UI is super-friendly and intuitive to use.
• No PHP is needed, no databases are necessary, and Slides has no server dependencies.
• The supporting documentation is first class in every respect.
• There’s an outstanding selection of slide visuals and effects to add to and enhance.
• You can select panels, transition animations, and navigation styles. All that at the click of a button.
• You can preview your Slides-generated website while you are building it.
• The websites you create with Slides will load crazy fast. This is important for your users, and for Google’s search engines.

Are you a web designer, a developer, or equally comfortable in both worlds? Either way, Slides will be a valuable resource to include in your toolkit. You’ll be surprised at the amazing look and feel your Slides-produced websites offer. Now’s a good time as any to get Slides and build amazing websites for your clients.

The post How to Use Slides to Create Impressive Landing Page Designs appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

If your content marketing efforts, social media, and paid advertising are all the bait designed to lure potential leads, then your landing page is how you reel in those all-important profits. The trouble is, most brands have no idea how to create an effective landing page.

There are countless elements that a top-notch landing page needs. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all guide to captivating your customers and earning that all-important sale, there are some best-practices you can follow to make your landing pages more effective.

By the time you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll know exactly what it takes to transform just another webpage into a conversion machine.

First Things First, What is a Landing Page?

Before we jump into an explanation of what makes the best landing page, the first thing you need to know is that your landing page is not necessarily your home page.

A landing page is where your visitors “land” when they click on a call-to-action or link that connects them to your company. It’s where they’re expected to hand over their contact information or perform an important action like getting in touch. For a page to be a landing page it must:

• Collect information or prospects
• Convert leads into potential buyers
• Demonstrate brand value

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at the essential elements of your landing page.

1. An Eye-Catching Headline

The average attention span isn’t great. When someone arrives on your landing page, you only have a few seconds to convince them that’s where they want to be, before they click the back button. A headline is where your conversion journey begins, grabbing your client’s attention and letting them know that you’ve got something special to offer. A headline should be:

• Unique and interesting: Thinking about the breaking news headlines on newspapers, they’re designed to make you look.
• Informative: A headline that’s too witty or clever might go over your customer’s head and leave them wondering what it is you do.
• Short and sweet: You can explain your product or service later, keep your headline short, direct and snappy.

Campaign Monitor’s landing page tells you what you need to know instantly with the headline “Better Email Marketing.” The header is short, informative, and packed full of value.

2. A Descriptive Subheading and Explanation

Now that you’ve caught your lead’s attention with an exciting heading, it’s time to explain how you’re going to give them the value they crave. Your headline should allude to your services, but your subheading and explanation goes a step further by laying your USP out there in black and white. Your subheading and explanation should be:

• Direct and Concise: While your sub header can be longer than your header, and your explanation can be longer still, you still need to get to the point as quickly as possible.
• Benefit-driven: Don’t just tell your customers what you can do, let them know what you can do specifically for them.
• Consider alternative content: If you’re concerned you can’t get your explanation across in a couple of lines, try including a video too. Companies that use videos on landing pages can increase their conversions by 86%!

The “Fabrik Brands” page below highlights what the company is, what it does, and how it values the customer. It’s quick, to the point, and completely customer focused.

3. A Form to Capture Those Leads

While some landing pages include a link to a contact page, or an “act now” button, some of the best landing page examples out there get straight to the point by allowing you to enter your details as soon as you see what they have to offer. The key to a great form is making sure that it’s long enough to collect the right information, but short enough that it doesn’t scare your customers away. When designing your form, remember:

• Keep it short: Forms with between 3 and 5 fields can have a 20% conversion rate, compared to only 15% for those with 6+ fields.
• Avoid personal questions: People don’t like to reveal too much information about themselves straight away. For instance, conversion rates are higher on pages that don’t ask for a customer’s age.
• Make it easy to use: Ensure that your customers can access your landing form on a desktop, tablet, or mobile with easy-to-click menus.

The Emprestimo Pessoal landing page is quick, clear and to the point. There are only four fields for leads to deal with, and the form itself is front and center in the page, making it easier to access and use.

4. Value Propositions or Benefits

Sometimes, you’ll be able to cover your unique values and benefits within the “explanation” section of the landing page. However, with more complex products or services, you might need a few paragraphs or bullet points that help you to go into more detail on what you have to offer. Remember, the most high-converting landing pages always answer the question “What’s in it for me?” This is your best chance to really sell yourself, so:

• Use different media to get your point across: Rather than just listing the benefits you have to offer, try using videos, images, and graphs to really engage your audience.
• Focus each benefit on the user: Instead of just talking about your company and telling your leads how amazing it is, let them know with statistics and figures, what they can get from you. For instance, instead of saying “We have a 98% success rate,” say, “You can enjoy a 98% success rate.”
• Keep scrolling to a minimum: Having a lot of value to offer is a great thing but remember that your client doesn’t want to scroll for days to get to a CTA or form.

The Crazy Egg landing page demonstrates three distinct user benefits with images, explanations, and an immediate call to action beside each feature. This is a great way to make sure you don’t lose a lead’s attention.

5. A Powerful Call to Action

Finally, the last thing you need is a chance to tell your customers what to do. If you want them to call you, include your number next to bold, attractive font that says, “Call Now.” If you want your customers to hand over their email address, give them a form field and follow up with a button that says, “Start Today.” A few rules of thumb to follow include:

• Use contrasting colors to make your CTA really stand out: This button or text should draw the eye of your customer more than anything else on the page.
• Make sure the copy is compelling: Keep it value-oriented and don’t use the word “Submit.” Customers don’t like to feel as though they’re handing over control.
• Use a button: Today’s customers have been trained to expect a button on their landing pages. It’s simple, easy to use, and it works on mobile devices too.

The CTA on the Airbnb landing page is friendly, user-oriented, and designed to stand out on the page in a bold, but not aggressive color.

Create Your Own High-Converting Landing Pages

Designing the perfect landing page doesn’t have to be a nightmare, but it does take some time, attention, and research. Follow the tips above and remember to frequently test your pages to find out which elements are more likely to convert.

The more you learn about your customers and how they respond to different form fields, CTA copy, and even color options, the more effective your landing page will become.

The post The 5 Crucial Features of a High-Converting Landing Page appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The bar for what makes a great landing page is always being raised, and there are some impressive designs out there from the last few months alone. Landing pages that showcase their product or service effectively and – crucially – in an elegant, bold or visually creative way will come across as being professional, and will always pique the interest of a potential user.

I want to share some of my favorite recent examples of stylish landing page designs. Each site has taken a huge amount of thought, care, and hard work to get the design just right.

Raindrop

Rdio

Tymeline

PaperSync

Ding

Morning

Icon Pocket

Boosted Boards

Baremetrics

BugHerd

Paper by Facebook

Mixture

Respondly

Freelancy

Trov

Slack

Timely

Mod Notebooks

Breeze

The post 15 Stylish Landing Pages for Web Inspiration appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

And of course, that’s a huge shame – as we all know, great design should be everywhere that a potential customer can find you – from the product itself, to it’s packaging and all the way to the marketing site and advertising. The bottom line is a well-designed landing page can increase the hype and sales for a physical product.

We’ve brought together some examples of thoughtfully designed landing pages for hardware products. Each one does an impressive job of showing off the product, with copy that fits well and helps build demand for the hardware.

Leap Motion

Leap Motion is a device that allows you to use gestures to interface with your computer, without having to touch the screen. The landing page does a great job of showing off the ‘Minority Report’ style interface, and they’ve used big, bold imagery to both show off the device in detail, and also show it in use.

The copy is also beautifully written, and is clear, concise and engaging. For example, “Do almost anything without touching anything” is a short, clever and instantly understandable heading to describe the product.

Google Glass

Google Glass is a complicated product to explain, as it can do so much, but the landing page to show it off is incredibly simple.

As always, Google has chosen to use large, bold imagery and copy that perfectly explains the benefits (“answers without having to ask”) instead of using dry features and tech specs.

Fitbit Aria

Fitbit Aria is a wifi enabled scale that builds up a picture of your weight, body fat percentage and BMI over time.
The product itself is beautifully designed, and the designers have gone to great lengths to truly show it off on the landing page.

The hardware itself is shown from all angles, and they even show it in use. On top of that, they show screenshots of the software that the Aria uses, and do a great job of explaining the benefits of using the system.

Nest

The Nest thermostat takes a relatively unsexy product – the home thermostat – and reinvents it with beautiful design at it’s core.

It looks amazing, it’s clearly easy to use and the entire user experience has been considered from start to finish. The same is true for their marketing page, which needs to convince people of the benefits of switching to a Nest, and uses clever animation to show the hardware in action and gives a rough tour of your first 30 days using the product.

Pen Type-A

Pen Type-A is an ambitious product to take an everyday object – the pen – and obsessively engineer it to create something that will last several lifetimes. While the typography on their landing page could potentially do with some work, the page does a great job of showing off the design and ethos behind the product.

Square Register

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup Square has earned a lot of respect for disrupting the payment industry. While their main product is the software itself, they’ve had some experience shipping actual hardware azzs well in the form of the card reader – and they’ve recently started partnering with other firms to sell physical products that support companies who use Square, such as a cash draw and customer facing, secure iPad stand.

The landing page they’ve used follows the same theme as Square’s regular marketing pages for their software – the copy explains the benefits over the features (e.g. “Secure your iPad to your counter. Swivel the stand so customers can sign with their finger”), and they’ve used an easy-to-read font size along with plenty of white space to help separate out the content.

Little Printer

Little Printer is an innovative, if somewhat expensive, desktop printer that connects to the web, and automatically prints small custom newspapers for you throughout the day. It can sync with apps like Foursquare, Google Tasks, Instagram and The Guardian, amongst many others, to create a custom newspaper just for you.

The marketing page is stunningly designed, with descriptive sales copy perfectly matching the product imagery. The close up shots of the hardware itself are of incredibly high quality that show off the quirkiness of the product. As an aside, the chunky “Order Now” button looks extremely satisfying to press.

Tesla Model S

The Model S is Tesla’s take on a high performance electric car, and could be a crucial turning point in the success of the company. It’s important that they get all of the marketing materials right to help promote the car, and they’ve gone into a ton of detail with the landing page.
For a product like this, there will always be two main readers – people who want to read every word and dig into the tech specs, and people who want to skim read.

Tesla’s landing page appeals to both, with copy that informs and pull out quotes and important tech specs (“416 Horsepower”, “4.2 seconds 0 to 60”) that are easy to read at a glance. The large, detailed photos help to showcase the car and work well to highlight the intricate details as well as the overall car design.

Apple

A focus on aesthetics runs through Apple and, as a result, their hardware landing pages have been beautifully designed for years. The iPhone 5 landing page, shown above, uses concise, clever copy paired with close-up imagery of the hardware. Further down the page, they explore individual features of the phone – and each of these is separated out with white space and, again, paired with an image to help illustrate that new feature.

Everything on the page either draws you to examine the hardware in more detail or to buy it either online or in-store. It’s a formula that Apple have perfected over the years, and they don’t just reserve it for their most publicised products.

The landing page for the Magic Mouse – part trackpad, part mouse – uses the same style, with snappy, sharp headings and expertly written descriptive copy, coupled with extremely high quality, beautiful imagery to help sell the hardware.

When it comes to designing a landing page that helps to showcase hardware, it’s hard to beat Apple – but adopting a similar, razor sharp focus on getting the details right can help to create excitement for your product and, ultimately, can lead to more sales.

The post Exploration of Beautifully Designed Product Pages appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

In this article I hope to introduce a series of ideas for constructing great landing page layouts. It may take a bit of practice utilizing a series of alternate design patterns. I think the best landing pages capture the visitor’s attention and quickly express their goals. And of course the circumstances will be different for each product. Consider a few of these ideas along with your own design senses to put together landing pages that convert & sell.

You might also like: Free Landing Page Web Templates for Photoshop.

Big Catchy Headlines

Titles and headlines are usually the biggest text pieces on your webpage. Visitors will quickly notice this text since it applies as a general overview to your products. Make sure your web copy is captivating and worth investigating further. You want to make visitors curious as to what you are offering them and how it could benefit their needs.

The landing page for Gridset uses big typography coupled with a full-scale background image. The product is used for creating fixed prototypes and wireframes for website projects. You can find a slew of features and examples by scrolling a bit down the page. However the captivation which leads you towards more information is their initial design which appears above the fold.

Another great example can be found on the page advertising Flex by Pantech. This is a mobile phone which should be considered a physical product, but the rules are still the same in any case. Notice how the top headlines are focused more on the product than anything else. The large buttons offer further presentation tools for understanding the Flex phone and its features.

Expanding on Details

All too often I will run into landing pages which barely explain anything about the product. This is especially the case with mobile apps where the visitor is expected to watch a video and learn about how it works. I would think developers shouldn’t expect visitors to sit around and watch/listen just to understand what the product does. So by adding more details right into the webpage you can offer better insight while driving away fewer visitors.

Although I do not personally use Flywheel I have heard nothing but good things about their services. After taking a peek at their homepage layout I would think these anonymous reviews are certainly on to something. Flywheel is a company which handles WordPress hosting for webmasters or design clients who don’t want to deal with all the backend stuff. Their services can definitely be confusing since you don’t know what they are expected to handle vs what you need to handle.

After scrolling a bit down the page you’ll find a nice list of features which they provide. Flywheel goes into much greater detail by outlining how the network is setup. Since the company is still in beta testing at this stage, there are not any other internal pages with greater content. This is a letdown for some readers because it would provide much better context for how to use Flywheel’s services. But even just focusing on the layout structure you can understand how the minor details greatly affect their overall product design.

Screenshots and Display Cases

When you are selling an application or digital product it is good practice to offer screenshots and previews. Visitors may enjoy checking out how your product would run in a natural environment – either an iPhone, desktop computer, or Mac/Windows/Linux OS. Or even when launching a small web application, it helps to explain some common misconceptions with your interface.

The Grooveshark music webapp has been online for years and many people already know what they can offer. But for their new Grooveshark landing page you can find a number of features which have yet to be implemented. Users of the old Grooveshark system will not access the updates until they manually select from their account. I feel the landing page offers a tremendous effort to bridge old users into a newer system.

They have provided screenshots from the various album views and music playlists. You can setup options for a radio feature which automatically pulls recommended songs based on related genres and artists. Similarly Grooveshark even updated with mobile screenshots for iPhone users. Just by glossing over this landing page you can tell that quite a bit of effort has been put into the design aesthetics.

Converting Page Sections

It is fair to say that almost every landing page is looking for some type of conversion. Whether that is new registrations, e-mail signups, or customers purchasing their product, the goals are similar. But you should really analyze the sections of each landing page which are looking for conversions. How are they designed? And what would a conversion look like?

The website for Treehouse is phenomenal and it includes a wonderful branding as well. The big green buttons with “Start learning today” behave as eye-catching objects among other elements. Users will click because they are interested in the library of contents Treehouse has to offer.

These page sections are also wrapped with very few distractions. Maybe an illustration or screenshot, or towards the top a small video stream. The purpose is to keep your visitors funneled towards a specific goal and provide the best possible design to push them forward.

Another example privy of page conversions is Rate Us. This digital webapp allows users and customers to rate, review, and comment on their experience with your product(s). This would be targeted towards small businesses or even larger companies which are looking for a service to handle customer feedback. The larger buttons at the top and bottom are geared towards acquiring interested users who have never heard of their services before. The design is fitted using illustrations to mesh with the branding and offer a consolidated presentation in the layout.

Selective Content

Each landing page will probably have a chunk of content you want to push as a larger target for most visitors. This means using highlights or bigger fonts to encapsulate a piece of the webpage for drawing in more attention. This selective content should be more important and relative towards the success of your product or services.

For the website layout of DesignBoost this has to do with understanding how their services work. At the very top you’ll find a small signup form which is used for converting new interested users. Similarly as you scroll down the page you will find a step-by-step diagram outlining how you can start learning iOS and launch your own application in the store. Bright buttons and graphics stand out because they are not used everywhere on the page – mostly places where visitors should pause and read into some of the content.

The content slider/gallery plugin SlideDeck is a premium product with its own landing page. Lots of important content for how the plugin behaves, along with how it looks in your WordPress theme. The designers have organized important content by adding icons and related screenshots. This makes the perfect foundation for curious WP users who may be interested in using a single plugin for managing content sliders.

Final Thoughts

Landing pages are a tricky concept and there are marketing experts still analyzing the best practices. I find that there is no method which beats out all the rest. Instead you have to consider design techniques which follow well in your own market, such as selling themes or PSD graphics or even mobile applications. All of these ideas will force a bit of change towards your landing page designs. But keep practicing and always be willing to analyze the greater details of your own work.

The post Landing Page Design Trends for Selling Digital Products appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

5. Dropbox

The cloud may be all over the place now, but it wasn’t when Dropbox first arrived on the market. That’s why when you load the Dropbox page, you get not just a deeper look into the site, but an engaging video that clearly covers questions that many people have about cloud storage, and why Dropbox is the solution. The video manages to be educational without ever slipping into condescension, and uses anecdotes as an effective tool. On a visual level, the clean, white look is both contemporary and professional. The only thing I would change is perhaps adding a tag line somewhere for more information, and making that call to action, “Watch a video,” a little more interesting or product-specific.

4. Animoto

On the other end of the spectrum is the landing video for Animoto. This video is all about emotional connection and creating a human experience that helps consumers connect with the family on camera. That said, I’d like to see a little more value propositioning. I like that they have three columns with copy promising other features, like a referral program, mobile apps, and the ability to sell more, but I don’t have a clear sense from the movie of what the product actually is and how it’s different from other programs, like iMovie.

3. Intuit

Intuit’s landing video is another great example of a video that clearly explains the product through an engaging story. It’s easy to see how the product might benefit the consumer, and we’re rooting for the likable protagonists the whole time. The only problem here is that the video is tiny, and there’s no way to expand it. Unlike the Dropbox video, which works well as both a video and as an interesting image that draws visitors in, my eye only falls on the video as a secondary feature.

2. UPS

Most businesses know there’s no better way to build trust than by having someone a customer knows or admires recommend their product. But that’s hard for big businesses to do on an individual level, which is where social proof comes in. By showing that they have a special relationship with Zappos, a wildly popular and trusted business, UPS’s credibility and cool factor skyrocket. After all, if UPS can help Zappos achieve their 75% repeat customer rate, won’t they do the same for you?

The only issues with this video have to do with focusing the viewer’s attention, the background, while visually interesting as a landing page, is distracting while we’re watching the video. That’s easily fixed by dimming the background when the user loads the video.

1. Dollar Shave Club

If you haven’t seen the Dollar Shave Club video, you’re way behind the six million plus people who have viewed it before you. Dollar Shave Club has become a textbook example of all that a good landing video can be. It demonstrates value by breaking all the rules, mocking its competitors, being borderline un-PC, swearing – you name it. That gives this video a little thing called voice — pretty much the only thing that could make a company stand out in such a crowded market. Does anyone really need Dollar Shave Club? Probably not. But the hilarity of this video has helped convince a wide male audience to give it a whirl, just for the cool factor.

How To Make Your Own Awesome Landing Page

Meet Your Audience Where They are
If you’re creating a landing page, you need to know exactly who your audience is; are you marketing to a field full of novices who have never before seen the likes of a product like yours, or are you marketing to industry experts who will feel condescended to with elementary explanations? Knowing your audience will frame every aspect of your approach. That means knowing where they are emotionally, too. For example, new business owners like the ones featured in the Intuit video aren’t just looking for a payment system; they’re looking for tools and services that say, “Hey, we know you’re busy. We believe in you and we’ve got your covered.” It’s important to know not just what your customers say they want, but what they really need deep down.

Make It Visually Engaging
There’s no point in spending time and money on a landing video if it’s just going to be a few experts dulling up the screen. If you’re on a budget, use stock footage or stock photos to help illustrate complex processes or just to spice the video up. Remember that the landing video is a part of an entire landing page, so make that opening still shot engaging and well-integrated into the site design, while still popping off the page.

Explain Your Product and Service Thoroughly
This should go without saying, but by the end of the video, your viewer should have a clear sense of what your product is and how it applies to them. There’s nothing more frustrating than wasting three minutes watching a video and still having no idea what’s on offer, even more so when there’s no supporting copy, or you have to sign up to learn more.

Have a Voice
If you take one lesson from Dollar Shave Club, it’s that the best landing videos have a clear perspective and voice. This is all the better for younger companies where that sassy, Internet humor is embedded in their DNA, but it’s just as important for more traditional b2b companies as they establish their expertise. The more distinctive your voice, the more you’ll stand out from competitors, the more business you’ll get.

Landing videos are fast becoming an essential part of any good landing page. No matter what your business or industry, getting creative and demonstrating your value in this format is key. So, get brainstorming, and get filming!

The post 5 Sites with Killer Landing Videos appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The best landing pages follow a basic structure that informs the user efficiently and gets them to take action in the shortest possible time. This is the AIDA formula – which is attention, interest, desire and then action. The best sites use this formula in a variety of different ways but all of them seem to get it right for their own goals.

Below is a compilation of the best bootstrapped startup landing pages that you can use to guide you in the making of your own landing page, they all (though in different spaces and with different conversion goals) follow a basic format that gets the user to take the action that they’d like them to take. Proof of their effectiveness is in their revenue performance (which I have also included in this post – based on estimates, from information that is freely available around the web).

And I chose bootstrappers because I figured, who better to learn from than self funded entrepreneurs?! They NEED to get this right! :)

Note: Revenue numbers have been gathered by researching openly available information from around the web. For example, the Lynda.com revenue numbers are based on this Techcrunch article.

Let’s Freckle!

• Founded: 2008 by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs of Slash7.
• What They Do: Provide time tracking software to freelancers.
• Estimated Revenue: $50,000 per month

Why is it their landing page so effective?
These guys know their audience. The page is structured in a perfectly AIDA (remember that?) way, and more importantly the actual text on the page, speaks to the user in a casual and – unlike some of their competitors, fairly straightforward way. The content on the page is mainly geared towards getting you to care as soon as possible. They know that their audience is time conscious so this landing page makes sure that you know what’s going on within 10 seconds. Which is pretty useful for time tracking site! Because the faster you do, the more likely you are to actually take an action!

Balsamiq

• Founded: 2009 by Peldi Guilizzoni.
• What They Do: Allow people to make mockups in an easy and friendly way.
• Estimated Revenue: $180,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
A lot of Balsamiq‘s appeal is in their image of being a ‘cafe down the road’ kind of service. You can really see that emphasized with the design elements that they use on their landing page. Like the table cloth pattern design behind the intro video and team picture at the top of the page. The feeling that these things exude, coupled with the amateur mockup elements used in the actual Balsamiq software, hit the nerve of the problem that they are trying to solve on a deep level. Mocking up is a creative process. And creativity needs a ‘cafe down the road environment/tool’ type of thing to help it along. What they have done is try to convey that as much as possible. And judging by their numbers. They’re succeeding and doing very well at it!

MailChimp

• Founded: 2001 by Ben Chestnut.
• What They Do: Provide email software.
• Estimated Revenue: $15,500,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This landing page focuses more on the I – interest and A – action parts of the AIDA formula than anything else. It is geared towards people who are coming in, probably already with an idea of what they want. Mailchimp just tries to give it to them, while presenting themselves as the best possible choice for it, if you’re preference is what they offer -simplicity and design. They don’t go too heavy on trying to convince you about their product, but all the things that they need to tell you for you to take that first action are there. It seems frictionless yet very beneficial, and that is why I think that it gets a lot of signups and eventually paying customers.

RealSmart

• Founded: 2004 by Gwyn ap Harri.
• What They Do: Provide innovative learning environment software to schools in the UK.
• Estimated Revenue: $185,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
These guys have a very unique type of customer – public institutions. Therefore the way that they present information differs slightly from your typical bootstrapped startup. The AIDA format is still followed. But it is done in a subtly different way. The content is geared more towards impressing the prospective customer than with directly telling them the exact problem that they are solving. This is because the process for selling to large organizations is a lot slower and often times you need to interact on the phone or face to face to close the deal. The key action for this site is a phone call. The impressing on this site is mainly done by showing the prospective client, case studies, who the partners of the site are, and showing the individual results that students and schools have had with real life videos. This adds a very personal touch that I am sure leads to many phone calls coming their way!

Woothemes

• Founded: 2009 by Adii Pienaar, Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester.
• What They Do: Provide Custom WordPress Themes.
• Estimated Revenue: $250,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
Woothemes by and large, let their themes do the talking on their landing page. Still following AIDA, they let you know the extra core information below the theme slideshow, but they know what their users are after. Great design and they do well to show this first. I believe that their core action is a click on the ‘view’ button for the template on the slideshow. Because once you get looking at the templates, with all of the interactivity that Woothemes provides, such as color changes, etc. The chances are much more likely, that you will eventually buy one.

Alien Skin Software

• Founded: 1993 by Jeff Butterworth.
• What They Do: Provide Photoshop Plugins for Photography and Graphic Design.
• Estimated Revenue: $295,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This landing page mainly focuses on using credibility to capture user interest. With celebrities like Evander Holyfield on the homepage, it gives the products more desirability, though not much is said about them individually. This is pretty fitting as the company behind has been around for a while so has the credibility tool in their toolbox. That is where the effectiveness of it comes from.

Envato

• Founded: 2006 by Collis Ta’eed.
• What They Do: Envato creates websites that help people earn income. Mainly geared towards the web, graphic design space.
• Estimated Revenue: $710,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This landing page is slightly different from the others as its mainly geared towards being a showcase for the various websites that the company makes. That said there is still a goal here of getting you to visit the sites as well as a secondary goal of getting you to understand what the company is about and stands for as a brand. They do this by presenting a short bio at the top that conveys their mission statement and this is further added to with their actual sites. Which each have descriptions that are very informative. The landing page definitely succeeds in making you want to visit the sites and engage.

Litmus

• Founded: 2005 by Paul Farnell, Matthew Brindley and David Smalley.
• What They Do: Litmus allow you to test your emails in a variety of different clients on just one computer.
• Estimated Revenue: $3,300,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
My belief is that using a video on a landing page is like the equivalent of using the ‘signature move’ in a classic fighting game. It wins. All the time. And not only does this site give you a great video, that conveys the information well (again, AIDA) but it also exhaustively, but not lengthily, gives you all the information you need about the services that the company offers to make a decision.

TechSmith

• Founded: 1987 by Bill Hamilton.
• What They Do: They make screencasting tools, including screen capture, recording and editing software, for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS such as Camtasia and Snagit.
• Estimated Revenue: $2,833,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This landing page keeps it simple. Standard AIDA flow, but with an emphasis on getting you to ‘learn more’, instead of taking a direct action upfront. The products that they sell are quite pricey, so they have definitely adopted a slower approach to their conversion funnel. Judging by the numbers, not to mention the number of years that this company has been around, this is working pretty well!

IData Inc.

• Founded: 2004 by Brian Parish.
• What They Do: Provide technology solutions to higher education in the US.
• Estimated Revenue: $200,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This is another company’s website, that sells to higher education institutions but it seems to have a different take on it than realsmart does. It simply displays the textual information needed for clients to oversee and understand what the business is about. There are two reasons why I think this is done and. One is to make the clients feel comfortable, by not having a too over the top website (this is pretty similar to a lot of institutional web pages). And two, is that this site is more of a reference point, to add to the client sale process – and ultimately supplements the sale process for the business.

Lynda

• Founded: 1995 by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin.
• What They Do: Lynda produces educational courses for creative people in a variety of fields.
• Estimated Revenue: $6,700,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This page is another case of a business that really understands its customers. The headline users the “videos that REALLY work”, with an emphasis on ‘really’. This, from the fact that most video tutorials are poorly done and can at times be ineffective at allowing the user to retain information. This is a core point being addressed very early on. Which would grab the target user, who is undoubtedly very familiar with this issue. They also put their videos at the forefront (with free, no login required viewing), which encourages users to engage with the site immediately, increasing Lynda.com’s chances of conversion significantly.

AnswerLab

• Founded: 2004 by Dan Clifford and Amy Buckner.
• What They Do: Provide customer insights to the leading brands around the world.
• Estimated Revenue: $300,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This landing page is the near perfect template for how to make a landing page that sells to enterprise clients. Again, here like the educational startups pages, they focus on impressing the prospective user, rather than explicitly stating the problem being solved and driving toward a specific action. The page overall is a lot more vague, and geared towards getting the viewer to want to know more. Perfect for enterprise clients.

BigCommerce

• Founded: 2004 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper.
• What They Do: BigCommerce are an online store service. Similar to Shopify. They make it easy to create and run your online store.
• Estimated Revenue: $1,080,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This is your classic online squeeze page. The only difference in this case is that this particular one is responsible for generating over $20m in annual revenue! This page is focused on giving you just enough information, then combining that with a frictionless signup process, to maximize the page conversion rate. My guess is that the users that land on this page have been pre-sold in a way, via ad copy or seo meta descriptions. So they know what they’re after and are the right kind of customer. Which makes the conversion rate even higher.

Visual Website Optimizer

• Founded: 2009 by Paras Chopra.
• What They Do: Provide a tool that allows websites to test the split test pages on their site.
• Estimated Revenue: $100,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This lander is somewhere in the middle of a squeeze page and your standard lander. I can imagine – what with the nature of the parent site/business that the page changes quite often, but as this is the one that I have seen most often. I can pretty safely assume that it is the best performing one. The page differs slightly from your average landing page AIDA format as it is very heavy on education of the problem and service. This is because it operates in a space that it still relatively new. Mutli-Variate Testing. This quick shot education, along with the free trail – likely converts very well.

Mashable

• Founded: 2005 by Pete Cashmore.
• What They Do: Mashable are a social news site/blog with an emphasis on startups.
• Estimated Revenue: $500,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
With this, we are entering into slightly newer territory as this is primarily a news site and therefore has a lot of information on one page. It is the way that the information is presented though, that makes this an effective landing page. There are a number of actions that the site wants you to take but the most important is the clicking onto the articles, therefore the most noticeable things on the page are the article titles. This is done with a clever use of spacing and typography.

Braintree

• Founded: 2007 by Bryan Johnson.
• What They Do: Provides an easy way to accept credit cards online.
• Estimated Revenue: $500,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This lander is as AIDA as you can get. Almost down to a tee. Starting with the simple, but very informative headline that grabs your attention and continuing on down, while continually building up your desire to use their product. What is slightly different about this page though, is that they emphasize the building of desire first, before leading onto to the additional information. This is an emerging trend in modern web design. Where previously, appealing to emotions was not as necessary. Probably because most web businesses previously were supported by ads and not the user directly.

37Signals

• Founded: 1999 by Jason Fried (Later partnered by David Hainermeier Hansson).
• What They Do: Provide simple productivity software to small businesses.
• Estimated Revenue: $5,000,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
This lander is the epitome of minimalism in web design. It does everything that it intends to do, with as little as is needed to do it. The main goal of this page is to get you to check out their individual products. This is mostly done by appealing to the D in the AIDA formula, the desire. By showing the user a lot of credibility boosting information, they are propelled towards the product and would want to check it out.

iTeleport

• Founded: 2008 by Vishal Kapur and Jahanzeb Sherwani.
• What They Do: Provide a simple way to control your computer remotely from anywhere in the world.
• Estimated Revenue: $100,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
iTeleports message is very clear. ‘Teleport to your computer’. This is a great headline. Straight to the point and tells the user immediately what the app is about. The page itself, again follows the standard AIDA format, with the end goal being a click on the ‘get started’ button. They do not need to do much more as their product solves a pain-point so well, that just sharing the basics, as is done here – does most of the hard work for you.

Zannee

• Founded: 2009 by Dane Maxwell.
• What They Do: Provide simple tools for realtors that makes their work easier to do.
• Estimated Revenue: $60,000 per month.

Why is it their landing page so effective?
The real world equivalent of this landing page, would be a shopping centre. Except in this case – the owner of the individual businesses is also the owner of the shopping centre. The target customer is shown complimentary products in a simple fashion, that in my opinion, transfers customers from one service to another. And for new customers, possibly increases their rate of conversion as they will likely find SOMETHING that they need from this site – from the choice of services.

The post Analysis of 20 Bootstrapped Startup Landing Pages appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.