I attended the session entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page of Design” presented by Tim Ash, President & CEO, SiteTuners.com (Twitter @tim_ash). Here the seven deadly sins of landing page design, outlined by Ash in a very humorous fashion:

1. Unclear call to action.

Focus your visitors on one thing. What it is that you want people to do on each of your pages? 1-800 Flowers is one of the big companies that was messing this up (on their product detail page).

Use Attention Wizard heatmap to find where people are looking on your page.

2. Too many options – steps.

Reduce the friction between the user and the product they are seeking. Show main categories that are most popular on your page – not every subcategory and product on each page.
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Your website is getting traffic, but these visitors aren’t taking action. Is it time for a redesign? Before you scrap the whole design and start from scratch, consider if it’s only a few elements on the page that are hindering your success. And thanks to Google Website Optimizer, there’s an easy way to find out using real user behavior.

It’s a little ironic to talk about best practices when the whole point of testing is that websites are not one-size-fits-all; best practices for page layout, calls-to-action, and information architecture might not apply to your specific niche of users. Nevertheless, here are some tips for setting up experiments that should apply most of the time:

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This afternoon, our Creative Director Gabriel was the guest on Doug Huggins’s show, BEST Business Radio, giving advice on successful business websites and online marketing techniques.

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