I 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?
Is 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.
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.
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.
Judging 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.
You 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.
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.
Spamming 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.
The 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?
Too 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:
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?"
Only 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.
Better 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.
I 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.
The 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.
Landing 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.
I can't imagine what, say, Facebook or Twitter would be like if you were just dumped into a "temporary account" profile before you signed in. It wouldn't make any sense.
Are 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.
Yes. 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.
What 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?
I 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?
Landing 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.
Certainly 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.
there 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.
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.)
I'm not overrating (really, overestimating) anybody's collective importance, I simply think degradability is a good idea. When I said it was a "world" like that, it was that these things exist, and coupled with disability concerns I work accessibility into everything I do. What is the downside? What of a contemporary web app is impossible to degrade?
As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear.
What is the downside? What of a contemporary web app is impossible to degrade?
I think there are two major downsides.
Firstly, there is the opportunity cost. Any time and money I spend catering to a niche group who choose not to support modern technologies properly is time and money I didn't spend improving the experience for everyone else.
Secondly, a lot of web apps are about convenience or entertainment. Beyond a certain point, a degraded experience isn't quantitatively worse, it's qualitatively worse, possibly even to the point of effectively making the entire service worthless.
As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear.
Yes it does. Having done that analysis for the businesses I run, the people blocking Analytics specifically are a small but noticeable minority, but the people blocking JavaScript entirely are noise, and quiet noise at that.
Based on that data, when it comes to so-called graceful degradation, we are far more interested in supporting the significant minority of visitors who have older versions of IE that don't support things like HTML5 and CSS3 well than we are in supporting those who nerf a perfectly good modern browser. YMMV, of course.
This 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.
'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)?'
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
Mere words cannot express the emotions that reading this made me feel.
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"); });
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_...
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?"
Yeah, the questions on unbounce are a bit too wordy.
Anyone can explain this? What's the "paid search quality score"?
(I found the best way to deal with this is to simply suggest they make it easier.)
The difference between a good and bad landing page is the difference between success and failure.
It is tempting to think that a better mouse trap does not need marketing. But a better mouse trap + marketing beats a better mouse trap every time.
1% boost in conversion in a business with $100,000 annual sales = $1000, which is almost double the price of the lowest plan.
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?
http://imgur.com/d2q3s
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.
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.
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.)
I'm not overrating (really, overestimating) anybody's collective importance, I simply think degradability is a good idea. When I said it was a "world" like that, it was that these things exist, and coupled with disability concerns I work accessibility into everything I do. What is the downside? What of a contemporary web app is impossible to degrade?
As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear.
I think there are two major downsides.
Firstly, there is the opportunity cost. Any time and money I spend catering to a niche group who choose not to support modern technologies properly is time and money I didn't spend improving the experience for everyone else.
Secondly, a lot of web apps are about convenience or entertainment. Beyond a certain point, a degraded experience isn't quantitatively worse, it's qualitatively worse, possibly even to the point of effectively making the entire service worthless.
As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear.
Yes it does. Having done that analysis for the businesses I run, the people blocking Analytics specifically are a small but noticeable minority, but the people blocking JavaScript entirely are noise, and quiet noise at that.
Based on that data, when it comes to so-called graceful degradation, we are far more interested in supporting the significant minority of visitors who have older versions of IE that don't support things like HTML5 and CSS3 well than we are in supporting those who nerf a perfectly good modern browser. YMMV, of course.
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)?'