Landing Page Optimization, Quick Design Tips
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 9:59 am
Are you planning some landing pages? Here are five QUICK design tips for speeding up the process and creating better landing pages.
Did you notice what I did with that preamble? That ought to give you an idea of what this article is about.
- Use a style sheet - CSS is popular for a reason. If you don’t know how to make a style sheet, go to Amazon and buy a book. It is easy to learn and one of the most important aspects of modern web design.
- Use fixed width columns - Monitors now come in all shapes and sizes. A big part of landing page optimization is the visual optimization. Fixed column widths let you know exactly how the page is going to look on your visitors’ screens.
- Use a quality page editor - I am partial to Dreamweaver. A good web page editor is expensive, but has a lot more versatility. Your pages should end up optimized for both IE6,7 and Firefox.
- Get colorful - I like a simple color scheme with my landing pages. I usually use red and blue for keywords. I am also partial to text highlighting, for which I use yellow.
- Optimize your images - Make sure that the images that you use are optimized. Dreamweaver does most of this for you, but you will need to manually enter a title for each image.
Category: Landing Page Optimization
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Comment by Tom Bonner
Made Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 2:18 pm
Hey Nick:
I agree with most of your points here, except the one about the Page Editor. Everyone prefers a different workflow and that is how it should be. Telling someone that they need an expensive, proprietary editor to create good landing pages is just wrong.
If you know HTML and CSS you can create excellent landing pages in any text editor. The editor you use has little or no effect on how your final page will look. It is all about the code and style sheets you create. I have used dozens of editors over the years — including Dreamweaver. I dare you or anyone else to look at my sites and say which editor was used to create which page.
I don’t understand what Dreamweaver has to do with optimizing for different browsers. If the designer knows how to write valid code, tests in all the browsers and employs techniques such as conditional comments, any site, developed with any editor can be optimized for all browsers.
Personally I favor HTMLkit for Windows and Pagespinner for the Mac. I don’t care for Dreamweaver, I feel the interface gets in the way. I still regularly edit in Notepad or TextEdit. But those are my preferences. You may prefer something else. That is fine — just don’t imply that a particular editor can create better landing pages than another.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter which editor you choose to use. Just make your pages look good in all the popular browsers.
Regards,
Tom Bonner
http://adventuresindesign.com
Comment by Allen Taylor
Made Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 4:01 pm
Personally, I’ve done my best landing pages in CoffeeCup. If you’re going to go through the trouble of learning CSS, you might as well just learn HTML and write all your pages in a text editor.
Comment by namecritic
Made Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 4:44 pm
He did say “I am partial to Dreamweaver”. He didn’t actually say dreamweaver creates better landing pages than any other editor.
Any editor will do as Tom points out, even the best editor in the world, NOTEPAD. 
My disagreement is that I don’t need any css for a landing page. If your site is large and you want to make sitewide changes via a stylesheet, that makes sense. No need for it on just a landing page.
of course i’m an old dinosaur and still use tables. lol
