How to Start Building a Product Landing Page Website

If you have been following my blogs you will have already seen posts that include some basic website web page HTML scripting.

HTML pages can be broken down into a few regularly used scripts. If you create a library of these scripts new websites can be quickly and easily constructed.

Landing Page Objectives:

The more upfront work you do the less time consuming changes you will have to do later.

A landing page is not a product squeeze page and is more focused than a blogging website.  Landing pages should be compliant for PPC advertising and SEO ranking.   Google, Facebook and Microsoft are becoming increasingly more restrictive about what type of advertising that they allow. The restrictions can be based geographical and can seem to be inconsistent.

Things I have found to be a problem are pop-ups, incomplete privacy statements, offers of free products, health sales and before/after weight loss pictures.

A landing page should be designed to encourage visitors to move to product sales pages, or sign-up to a subscriber list.

Landing pages can have a lot of product related information links but these should be less conspicuous than the product download and opt-in forms.

Text information with keywords will help page rankings but also can distract visitors from the main objective of the page which are sales Opt ins and conversions.

Pages built primarily from images can be rejected for SE indexing and PPC because they are not recognized as legitimate web pages.

The objective for PPC advertising should include enhancing the landing page search engine rankings.  PPC impressions can be an inexpensive way of improving the web page presence compared to competing for valuable category clicks.

Your landing page web site will most likely include privacy policy, thank you and additional information pages.

Landing pages should be clean, uncluttered and be quick to display.

Here are two examples of my landing pages; The Diet Solution Program and My PC Satellite TV and you will note my selection domain name keywords for these sites.

how to Start a New Website Design?

It’s always a good idea to start out with a clean piece of paper and a pencil so that you can draw out a rough sketch of what you want your landing page to look like.

If you are creating an affiliate website take look at the product vendor’s site and other similar sites.

Find what works, and what doesn’t work on these sites and try to find areas where you can create additional value for your landing page.

Decide on the look for the header, body content and positioning of forms and banners etc.

Then look for a free html template which most closely fits the look and feel of the landing page you want to create.

The advantage of using a template is that it will have a style sheet.ccs file, page layout, menu buttons and theme colouring.

One thing to check is the width of the template.  If you’re an affiliate site you may want to a theme that closely resembles that of your product vendor.  Size can also affect the placement of body content and to resize a template takes a little more time add some css scripting knowledge.

HTML Tools:

I find that there are very few tools that provide all the features that I like and therefore I use a number of tools for creating html web pages and editing graphics.

For this project I am going to be using KompoZer and Microsoft Visual Web Developer for HTML editing and Gimp 2 for creating a new header image.

Tip: Don’t get “hung up” by the technical aspects of this project. The easiest way to learn is to not think about the code, or graphical issues, just break the project down into its small component parts.  This way the “how to” will reveal itself as you progress with the project.

Tip: Don’t try to reinvent things, always look for something that you can copy and improve upon.

Tip: Use the http://www.w3schools.com website as a comprehensive guide to website scripting

Summary:

In this blog we have covered the groundwork for defining functionality of a landing page and how we want it to look and feel.

Now you should at least know what to look for to find an HTML template that fits your requirements to kick start your landing page project.

Tip: it’s easier to remove features from a template than to add new ones in.

In the next blog I will cover creating a header image, adding body text, forms, banners, links and SEO scripts.