Site - Keep the Landing Page Simple

Research indicates that most visitors know what they are looking for when they hit your website so the trick is ensuring that they can get to where they want to be quickly by removing frustration and preventing the visitor from leaving the site to another that’s easier to use.

Reduce Friction

It shouldn’t be complicated to design a structure that works and flows for the user. Identify the elements they are looking for and make it easy for those elements to be found and utilised.

The key is to make it easy for the guest to find what they are looking for and execute quickly. Easy to access booking buttons; promotional offers and news; easy navigation and of course strong introductory content and imagery that increases the volume of the call to action.

However can you put too much on your homepage?

Can we use Pop Ups, Lightboxes or Hovers?

One of the most requested functions when designing landing pages is the inclusion of what would commonly be called a “pop up” (although it may actually be a lightbox or Hover area.) There is no doubt that pop out or pop up boxes have a role to play and we use them frequently for functions such as newsletter sign ups or Booking engine requests.

In both of these examples however the pop up is triggered by a definite click by the user because that is what they are looking for.

The pop ups to be thought twice about are those that simply appear over the top of your homepage every time it loads. To many users they jump out like annoying adverts and for many they are annoying and in the way. We would normally advise against using them.

There may be no definitive evidence but the user is not overly fond of pop ups and there are plenty of other ways to engage the customer.

Use your header imagery

All of our sites now have fully updated header images with the ability to add Titles, sub titles and links. Use these to promote your forthcoming events rather than laying a pop up that simply obscures the original site

Use your feature Boxes

Again all of our sites come with the ability to add and update feature boxes (similar to newspaper puff boxes or “tiles”) directing the user to your featured content. You can update the graphics, title, sub title and link once again. These can provide the quick links and reduce friction for changeable content.

Link Boxes in page

We advocate calls to action at the foot of all content pages to ensure that your site visitor has somewhere to go should they be interested in what they have read – calls to cation could be Book Now, Contact Us, Download Brochure or any redirect to internal or external links.

All our sites are designed where graphic buttons are automatically created for these links giving more prominence to your calls for action.

Everything moving?

It is a personal opinion but we try to avoid too many moving parts on a homepage. Too many sites look like a Sky Sports page with main images being overlaid by two speed ticker tapes at the bottom, moving features on the right, sliders at the bottom and pop ups jumping up all over the place. The brain cannot process the overload.

Keep it clean and simple. 

Position your key calls to action where they can be seen and clicked and avoid cluttering. Just because you’ve seen something on another big name website does not mean it is always best practice. Apply your own logic and see everything from the customers’ point of view first.