Small Business Resource: Website Landing Pages

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July 12, 2007

Website Landing Pages - How to Win

Font Face, Color & Size: There is one thing that I hate, and that is 4-5 different fonts that clutter up the landscape of the page. Different Fonts for headlines is fine. Different fonts in your body text is not original, it is distracting. Don't do it. Keep it to one font in your body text.

Testing shows that the best 'off line' (print) font is Times New Roman. This is why it is the default font on the internet. However, testing also shows that Times New Roman is one of the worst fonts online. Why? It causes rapid eye fatigue due to how it appears on the screen.

The best fonts? Verdana and Arial. I standardize on Verdana as it consistently outperforms every font out there in terms of reducing eye strain and increasing readability. You may not have known that, and it is key information.

I have seen some landing pages that use an unusual font and when I look at it on a system that is limited in fonts, the formatting looks 'off' and unprofessional. Use standard fonts in your body, if you want an usual font for a headline, create it as a graphic so it will look the same on every computer.

The text should be readable. The standard size is '2'. Text should always be dark on a white background. Landing Pages aren't designed to allow you to show off how 'cute' you can be. This is serious stuff, you are selling a product or a service. Act like it by putting on your 'best face'.

There is a reason that the top companies choose dark text on a light background. It isn't by accident, it is by design. Follow their lead.

Don't Let Search Engines Crawl Your landing pages - Many marketers want as many pages in the search engine indexes as possible. Don't do this as I mentioned above.

Place your landing pages in separate folders and exclude those folders in your robots.txt file. If you don't want to display those to competitors, you can instead put a placeholder file for the index.html page for the folder, or exclude the directory list from showing to a visitor. Another option are to put the exclusion in your .htaccess file or in your IIS control. The reason that you don't want these pages indexed is because the text is often a mirror of your sales pages and you don't want to have a duplicate content penalty in Google.

Make the Links Easy to Find - Now, having a cool CSS file that makes the links change colors, add or remove underlines is fine on your site. Knock yourself out. However, they have no business on your landing pages. You want everything standard on your landing pages. Why? Because confusing a visitor is not your priority. Wowing your visitor is not your priority. Getting them to buy and making it as easy as possible is. That is what you do.

So, use standard linking practices so there isn't confusion. If a potential customer can't distinguish between text and a link you are going to lose.

Standard colors are:
Unvisited Link - Underline in Blue
Active Link (when the mouse 'hovers' over the link - Red
Visited Link - Purple

The above information is from the W3C.

I recommend not messing around with the visited link - just have the standard unvisited and hover for your landing pages so the visitor has some interactivity and the link will 'catch' their eye. I have done a ton of testing on landing pages, and the standard linking practices always have better conversion ratios.

Make sure you are always using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to do your formatting. If you don't know how to do CSS, you need to learn or find a webmaster who does. It will pay off with less time changing all of your pages individually instead of just changing one file.

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Posted by David at July 12, 2007 2:49 PM