When it comes to boosting your web presence, your website plays a big role in helping you generate leads that translate into sales. But if you want to generate a lot of traffic for your site, then you need to focus on the first place where online visitors will lay eyes on your content: your landing pages.
In essence, your landing page serves as the “parking lot” where visitors from search engine result pages (SERPs) will be redirected to and find out everything about your brand. The landing page is where they will learn more about your business, the services you offer, and why you are the perfect fit for their needs. Hence, it’s vital to ensure that your landing page delivers an optimal user experience (UX) that will keep visitors coming back for more.
That said, there may be some design principles that you would want to bear in mind when crafting your business’s landing page. These aspects of design can sometimes be difficult to master, which is why many brands opt for professional web design services to help them communicate their message visually without losing web functionality.
Regardless of whether you’re seeking external web design assistance or not, it would still be a good idea to understand some key elements that are relevant to designing a landing page. Here’s what you should know about creating web pages that make an impact and encourage visitors to connect with your brand.
Simplicity and Negative Space
As a rule of thumb, you need to keep your landing pages simple to prevent overloading your visitors with too many visual elements. At its core, a landing page is there to grab users’ attention and encourage them to keep exploring your site. As such, you can do away with clutter—such as too many clickable elements. Instead, you need to simplify navigation through a single focal point, impactful typography, optimally placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and an overall neat user interface (UI).
Additionally, it would be a good practice to use a single palette to keep your page aesthetically cohesive, but you can play around with contrasting colors to highlight CTAs and other enticing offers like special discounts. It’s also worth noting that having fewer elements on a page keeps loading speeds fast, which is good for sustaining search engine optimization (SEO) metrics like time on site.
A good principle to keep in mind is negative space, which is the use of empty space around design elements to make them engaging and coherent. Making use of white space keeps your design fresh, plus it drives cerebral interactivity with the way it encourages the brain to fill in the gaps. Ultimately, the goal is to get people curious—the less they know, the better.
Visual Hierarchy
The principle of visual hierarchy posits that all design elements on a given page must be featured by order of urgency or importance. Usually, the most prominent elements on your page are the focal point, the value proposition, and your CTAs. The reason why visual hierarchy matters is simple: the eye is drawn toward the largest shapes. Assessing a landing page should not require much thought, so your site must avoid heavy blocks of text that could discourage visitors from exploring what you have to offer.
F-Shaped Layout
According to eye-tracking researchers, the F-shaped layout is good for web design since it mimics most people’s scanning pattern, which is top to bottom and left to right. The F-shaped layout also makes it easier for users to read through text, with most people often scanning the first few lines of text before moving down to see what the rest of the content is about. For this reason, the F-scan pattern is considered to be the standard for layouting web content.
That said, landing pages that require lots of images may also benefit from E-scan, L-scan, and Z-scan patterns. Similar to the F-shaped layout, these replicate the way our eyes move naturally through a page. All in all, keeping these different layouts in mind will help you determine the best positioning for your specific type of web content and how these patterns can ensure a comfortable experience for visitors passing by your page.
Responsive Design
In a nutshell, responsive web design (RWD) refers to the capacity of your landing page to be automatically converted for viewing on mobile devices. With millions of smartphone users around the world, you also need to think about how users view your page using a mobile device. Ideally, your landing page must be adaptable enough to suit different screen sizes and orientations for mobile users.
To ensure a mobile-friendly design, you need to make CTAs clear and large enough for finger taps. It would also be ideal to keep words evenly spaced and the fonts large enough to prevent users from squinting their eyes when the text feels too small or cramped.
Lastly, you need to make sure that search and navigation functions are easily identifiable on smaller screens such as phones and tablets. Generally, designers recommend placing navigation bars to the left and search bars to the right to make them easier to reach when holding a phone.
Final Thoughts
Many other elements constitute a well-designed landing page, but these are among the most important ones that brands as well as developers and designers must be familiar with. To further elevate your page’s design, you can apply SEO elements alongside your content and make sure that the copy contains the right keywords to support the page design in keeping eyeballs on the website. On top of that, you can launch A/B testing efforts to see if all elements in your landing page are working and navigable enough for users whose attention spans you need to extend.
As an end goal, your page should achieve its purpose of getting a fair share of traffic and selling your brand within a short window of time. By keeping these key principles in mind, you can create a landing page that effectively captures the focus of online users through both aesthetics and functional design.
