Optimising landing pages

First impressions are important; as the quote goes “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. The first impression a potential user has with your website could decide whether they stay and look around or dive straight for that backwards arrow on their browser window.

Your sites landing pages could be one of, if not the, most important page of your site. Here’s a few simple Do’s and Don’ts with the aim of helping lower bounce rates and up returning visitors.

 Do: 

Have a clear call to action:
The aim of a landing page is to clearly prompt towards a certain action or results. Whether it’s purchasing an item, registering or signing up for a newsletter or even simply encouraging visitors to explore your site more, it’s important to stay focused on that goal.

Your aim is to make the trip for your visitor as simple as possible, the easier or more enjoyable you make it for your customer to get to the end of their user journey through your site, the more likely they are to stick to it.

Use brand validation:
If you’ve got some big clients on your list, don’t be afraid to name drop and put their logos out there. Association can be a powerful tool and increase trust in a company, and as we mentioned when looking at site usability, trust can be a very important factor online.

Share!
Most people are familiar with social media, the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and such. Based from the common mantra that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it, putting in social share icons will help spread your site around. Statistics dictates that more likely than not, the more visitors to your site then the more conversions you’ll make!

Optimise!
Keep coming back to your analytics and looking at your sales conversions, you might find that certain keywords are pulling in customers and others less so. Of course these can change constantly, so it’s important to keep doing it! After a while you’re sure to find the combinations that work best for your market, so keep reviewing.

Be design and user conscious: 
Of course, with scroll bars on windows, your site can technically be as ‘long’ as you want it, but resist the temptation to go crazy! It’s fairly well acknowledged that most people don’t pay much attention to content ‘below the fold’ (anything that users have to scroll down to view). So don’t hang around and get straight to the point at the top of your page.

Keeping basic aesthetics and consistency is important throughout your site. A design that looks cheap and obnoxious doesn’t help a company’s credibility, and a poorly built site will not encourage users to stay and look around.

Cater for different platforms:
Smart-phones are everywhere, and now tablets too! Of course this can depend on your target audience or what your aim is for your landing page, but with more and more people browsing through their mobile devices, it’s something many companies need to take into account. There are plenty of different approaches you can take with this; from responsive design to a completely optimised website, or even a mobile application.

Don’t: 

Go overboard:
Simple designs are best; furthermore make sure your page loads quickly. An image heavy landing page may look great on paper, but in practice anything that takes longer than a few seconds to load is going to lose visitors.

Whilst we’re on the topic of design, try and keep a smooth consistent flow from page to page on your site, whether its colour palette or visual elements, you don’t want to confuse your visitor by convincing them they’ve stumbled into something entirely new the moment they stray away from your landing page.

Make it too complex:
Depending on the aim of your landing page, you might have some kind of simple functionality on it, such as a form to sign up for a newsletter and so on. Keep it simple! The quicker and easier it is the better, let the user tab between fields, use check boxes rather then drop down menus and auto-populate where you can. Avoid asking for too much detail if you can, it might be a deal killer.

Misrepresent:
People love kittens (or puppies, if you prefer) but you don’t need one on your landing page (unless maybe you’re selling kittens? In which case I guess you could get away with it...), a bit of creativity isn’t a bad thing, but you don’t need to distract your customers from their goal.

Furthermore you certainly don’t want to give your user the wrong impression; nobody likes to waste their time. Try and avoid content on your page that doesn’t ultimately point towards the visitors intended destination.


Now of course there are plenty more odds and ends that you can incorporate when looking at optimising landing pages, this is just a quick overview. Even then some of these points may be more heavily weighted then others, depending on the aim of your particular landing pages. If you'd like to read more about optimising and usability from an e-commerce point of view, then take a look at last month's light hearted take on it.

If you're interested in learning more about how Rocktime can help you, from sites to search marketing or mobile to bespoke development then why not get in contact and drop our sales team a line.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Improving your 404 Error Message page

Image credit goes to NetDirekt and their 404 page design.

When a user lands on your 404 pages, it means that something went wrong. Either the user clicked on a broken link, or they may have mistyped your URL. For more information on what exactly a 404 page means, why not take a look at our "What's in a 404 page?".

Whatever the reason, landing on a 404 page is by no means convenient for user, or website owner. While a little humour – “WOOPS try again, click here” could be added to the 404 page, it's important to stress that the main message should be to let the user know that they haven’t reached the end of their journey and to provide useful options/navigation posts to help them find the page they seek.

Rather than just saying, this page can’t be found return to home page, we advise our clients to:

• Include a simple / apologetic statement.
• Add a site search box to the 404 page.
• Add a link to most popular category pages along with a list to the website onsite sitemap.
• Provide a link to a contact form, so that users can reach out to you directly.

Our favourite usability expert Jakob Nielsen, termed by U.S News and World Report as “the worlds’s leading expert on web usability” states that all error messages must be;

• Written in plain language that is easy to understand for non-technical users and that does not imply that the mistake is the user's fault
• precise in specifying exactly what was done wrong (that is, not be generic or vague)
• constructive in suggesting steps the user can take to correct the problem.

We advise our clients to regularly check their analytics to monitor the amount of times people have seen the 404 pages. If the error page is in your top 20 content pages, then there is a clear problem with your site's design or navigation.

The Flashlight team regularly send each other good looking 404 pages, please check out one of our favourite lists for creative error pages, although these 404 pages ooze creativity, some do lack some of the usability / useful features that Jakob talks about above.

One we particularly like from HootSuite includes the below:

• Starts with a simple / apologetic statement
• Explains: why the user has landing on the page
• Highlights where they could go next

If you think your website could do with some improvements, and not just in terms of 404 pages, why not get in contact with our sales and web development team here at Rocktime.


Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

What's in a 404 page?

If we’re going to establish what makes an effective 404 error page it makes sense to start by explaining what an error page is. Now as error pages aren’t exactly the most exciting of subjects so in the interests of keeping you entertained as well as informed the following may not be exactly how things happened...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away pixies invented something called the internet. The internet was a magical, wonderful place where people from all over the kingdom could go to do anything their imaginations could conjure up. They could play games, speak with people from across the kingdom and even settle up household utility bills with companies that, thanks to a big sell off of national interests in the eighties, are now essentially foreign owned.

Now as everybody knows pixies are very wise indeed. They had the foresight to realise that, given the fact the internet was a global phenomenon based on a network of millions of computers running over telephone lines and administered by humans, it was inevitable that things would go wrong. So the pixies gathered the wisest wizards from across the land and over a feast of unicorn pizzas and the juice from a magical red bull they came up with a list of standard laws that should be obeyed by everyone in the land. If something was ever to go wrong on the internet a page would be displayed with an error message. In order to help fix the problem these pages would have code numbers which would explain what had gone wrong so that other wizards could fix the problem.

Ok, so it’s not exactly how it happened but it’s close enough.

When your computer accesses a web page it will receive something called a response code. These codes are essentially three digit numbers. If this number begins with a 1 or a 2 then everything is pretty much hunky dory and as such the chances are you’ll never be aware of these responses. Anything beginning with a 3 signifies that the page has moved a 4 suggests client error and a 5 means that there’s a server error. These last three response codes usually result in an error page being displayed.

A 404 error is served up when a file (typically a web page) could not be found, it simply doesn’t exist. This can happen for a number of reasons, the user could have made a mistake typing in the URL, the page may have been deleted or, much as it pains me to admit, occasionally links are coded incorrectly. An un-styled 404 error page can look like this:

Let’s face it, that’s not much use to anyone apart from geeks. However, the user ends up with something like the above; there is very little useful feedback and unless they’re persistent, you’ll end up losing them and their business to one of your competitors.

So what are the alternatives? Well as a bare minimum, the page should look friendlier and feel less like I’m being told off by a teacher. Next up the reasons as to why the page might be being displayed should be in clear English with an informal, non technical tone. There could also be links to the main pages of the website so I only have to click once to get back on track and in an ideal world it should look like the rest of the website so as not to look broken. (People will think twice about parting with cash online if the website doesn’t look fully functional!)

If you think you might need some internet pixies* to help with your online needs, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our sales team about how we can help you expand your online presence.

*Pixies may not be included.


Author: Foz

Geek Video of the month

February's Geek Video of the month promotes the new website Lego Click, which seeks to let people share their LEGO photos to inspire others. The video gives you a brief glimpse of what is in store for you if you visit the site, visitors can also visit the iPhone application (LEGO Photo) from here, enabling you to immortalize precious moments in Lego, check it out.

A great site for brand engagement and really inspires us to get some lego in the office.