What is the most important page on your business website?

Thought that it was the homepage, or the 'contact us’ page? Sorry, but you’re completely wrong.

It’s not that these pages aren’t important because they are. They include key information about your company, your product or service and your brand and they allow visitors to make an enquiry. But the most important pages on your business website are your landing pages.

Landing pages (also called ‘lead pages’) are pages that are designed specifically to capture fresh leads. They are usually linked to an online campaign and include relevant keywords that make your product or service more likely to be found in online search results. Most importantly, they should guide the visitor towards a specific course of action (getting more information, downloading something or making an online purchase).

A website will often have different landing pages for particular promotions and campaigns. Often these will include different versions of the same landing page that provide statistics on which keywords and approaches rate better than others. This ‘A/B testing’ means that you can ‘tweak’ and refine your landing pages to optimise your search results. Furthermore, this can be done very quickly enabling business owners to improve landing pages that are doing well and modify or cull pages that are not performing as desired.

A landing page is not a typical website page. While it should include branding cues that link to a business, it will differ in these areas:

1. It will have clear, concise and strong headline that complements the online advertisement that featured in the search result.
2. It will have impeccable spelling and grammar. If this is the first contact a visitor has with your company it's important to create a good impression, particularly if you're asking them to buy something!
3. It will feature trust indicators, including references from reliable sources such as media. If you're wanting people that don't know you to hand over personal information or buy something you need to establish trust. Trust indicators can include testimonials or industry affiliations.
4. It won’t have navigation any other web pages. Instead it will have a clear call to action that guides viewers into your ‘sales funnel’.

Well-constructed landing pages guide visitors through a process and capture key information, resulting in increased enquiries and sales leads while growing your enquiry database.

To find out more about landing pages and how they can work for your business talk to us at mhdesign.

CMS or static pages? You decide!

What do you want from your website?

No, really. Do you want an online brochure that presents your company and its services? Are you more interested in featuring current news and events? Are you planning to frequently update your content? Perhaps most importantly, do you have the necessary skills?

Many people would say that a website should include a Content Management System (CMS). These websites can have all the latest features, blogs, RSS feeds, etc plus an administration console where a site administrator can edit or add content to the site. Sounds great, doesn’t it? No HTML or coding knowledge required! With one of these sites you can do your own updates and there’s no need to go back to your designer or web developer everytime you want to change something.

However it pays to be careful. Having a database-driven website can open the door to all manner of security issues, not the least of which is having someone ‘inject’ malicious code into your database, corrupting it and allowing them administration access to your files. How would you cope if this happened? Who is responsible for backup and restoration of your data and how often is this done? What do you know about site security? If your site uses a complex CMS with lots of features, do you have the knowledge to operate it properly?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposed to Content Managed websites at all. I build and administer both static-content and CMS sites and can see that CMS interfaces are a great way for site owners to maintain their own websites. But each CMS is different and they’re often a ‘one size fits all’ solution. If you stick to creating and editing text content, fine. But if you have a need that’s even slightly outside the scope of what the site is capable of, you’re stuck. Unless you can find a workaround (which usually involves a bit of old-fashioned HTML know-how).

If you’re not into constantly updating your web content and you want a stable site that can’t be compromised with the flexibility to modify pages to look the way you want them to, good ol’ HTML, with a smattering of CSS, can still be the best way to go!

New image lightbox gallery online

Visitors to our website mhdesign.co.nz may have noticed the updated illustration gallery. While I'm still working on new content, I have improved the interface from a CSS/Javascript popup to an easier-to-use 'lightbox' format.

A quick search on the internet led me to Lokesh Dhakar's Lightbox2 JavaScript application. Lightbox2 is easy to install and configure. Thanks Lokesh!