When developing landing pages

Somedays back I had to write a one-pager on essentials of building a landing page. It got me thinking on what is crux of the things one should take care of when developing a front-page of their website/business.

User Interface and User Experience

As a web-designer and as a consumer I have felt the importance of an intuitive user interface.

We should aim to design functional sites that can easily attract interest and drive online traffic. I think the website design and layout are very domain specific, in a way that an e-commerce website should look and feel different from a news aggregator website.

Couple of point which I keep in mind while developing web-pages are minimalist design themes, appropriate color-scheme and intuitive workflow. My go-to reference when making some design choices is Google’s Material Design docs.

Performance Optimization

When designing web-pages, another key thing to note is how quickly is your website served to the end-user. Losing a second to load is akin to losing a customer forever. Therefore the performance of the software is important. I try to employ both server-side and client side performance optimization techniques. Using minified CSS/JS to reduce load time in browser, reducing HTTP requests (reducing third-party plugins), using less-resolution images etc are some of the common methods we can employ to reduce load time.

Also it is important to use responsive design templates to make the website perform optimally across devices. I have used twitter bootstrap and media query to achieve that in past.

SEO Optimization

Finally I feel a landing page would get traffic only if it is SEO optimized and feature at the top in the search results. It drives the quantity, quality and organic traffic for the web-site. The website content should be easily parsable by Google crawlers while they index the website. We should do a keyword research which the users use while searching for the relevant content. Finally the titles and meta-information of our page should reflect the content of the page.

I feel these are the broad themes one should look into while designing landing pages.