Denver Web Design & Denver SEO - The Katz Web Design Blog

Adding value to your landing page

Landing page design is focused on having a user perform an action. Every piece of content should revolve around why and how a user should perform that action. Landing pages don’t need to be dull or static, however. I’m going to talk about a simple way I spruced up a career-oriented landing page: a salary calculator.

At CareersWithDish.com, we wanted to entice sales professionals to apply for a job with Dish Network. We featured the standard landing page content, including:

• 8 compelling reasons to work for Dish
• Text and images that reinforce the upward income mobility
• Simple form with basic information fields as the focal point of the page

Let’s give’em something to talk about

Bullet points, text, images, and a simple form are good enough for a landing page, but we wanted to spruce it up a bit, so we added a calculator that shows possible income with live updating numbers.

What this simple calculator achieves is it activates emotion. It’s the same feeling as when you work for a company and are at the company’s Christmas dinner, wondering if you’ll get a bonus, and for how much…the calculator translates the language of “Total compensation up to $79,040” into “I can do this!”

So what’s the emotional attraction of your landing page? Does it have an interactive element? Even a simple slideshow can be the difference between a lead and a bounce.

Personalities and what motivates them

The calculator will be of interest to sales people; they often care about numbers and the bottom line.

What if you were designing for a baby carriage company…

What would interest mothers? Perhaps:

• Slideshows of babies in the carriages
• A video of how simple it is to collapse the carriage and put it in the car
• Swatches of color and pattern choices
• Diagram of how much storage the carriage has
• Long term warantees for normal wear and tear

This kind of brainstorming makes the difference between a mediocre landing page and a great one. Let me know what your favorite landing pages are, and why.

For those interested in how the calculator was created, I will write about that soon. It was created using the script.aculo.us slider class. Check out the code at the CareersWithDish.com landing page.