
Checklist for Creating a Landing Page - matt1
http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/checklist/
======
danso
Too many of these items are redundant...variations of saying "Is your message
clear?" I guess some startup creators need that question drilled into their
head?

But the main issue of this checklist is that its items are too broad in scope
and too subjective...The bullet points of a checklist should be concise and
easy to answer with "yes" or "no".

I'm thinking along the lines of the famous hospital checklists written about
by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande)

The checklist is not full of items like: "Does the patient seem healthy?", "Is
the patient overly nervous?" "Do you feel well-rested?", but "Did you wash
your hands?" "Are you wearing a sterile mask?" "Did you apply antispetic onto
the patient's skin?"

~~~
shurane
So less on vague questions that need some thought and more on concrete details
that can be easily checked/fixed.

Yeah, the questions on unbounce are a bit too wordy.

------
davidcelis
"If the counter isn’t going up when you check all those boxes, give the page a
refresh. It’s finicky."

Mere words cannot express the emotions that reading this made me feel.

~~~
sergiotapia
It seems a simple script to tally all `:checked` elements using jQuery is too
much for this blog to handle.

~~~
talmand
The javascript involved does seem overly complicated for such a simple task.
Maybe it was originally intended for something else and somehow found its way
onto this page?

~~~
skeletonjelly
For anyone reading: [http://unbounce.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/themes/un...](http://unbounce.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/themes/unbounce2/js/scorecard-ultimate-lpo.js)

~~~
skeletonjelly
Can't seem to edit my comment. Anyone know why?

Anyway somebody asked me how to do it, but delete their comment. Paste this
into your console, they already have jQuery loaded.

jQuery('.blog-post input').change(function() { console.log("Score: " +
jQuery('.blog-post input:checked').length + "/50"); });

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purplelobster
What I don't understand is why some services don't just show off the product
right away, instead of showing a landing page. This is obviously not
applicable to everything but in many cases I don't want to see your polished
pitch, have to input my email and sometimes phone and address. I just want to
see what it is and what I can do with it. Just as an example, let's say I've
built an amazing email client, even better than gmail. Why not make the
landing page an actual email account with fake data? Or at least give the user
a small piece of info, a button for logging in, and a button straight to said
demo?

~~~
state
I agree with this completely. I don't care about how you think about your
product, I care about what your product _is_.

Why am I so often tasked with the work of wading through all fifty of these
bullet points someone tried to mash in to a single page instead of simply
seeing what the thing does?

~~~
jamesbritt
When I see a page like that my first thought is, "Oh, it's not ready."

------
ajjuliani
I put up a landing page and "Showed HN" a few weeks ago created on unbounce.
The general thought was that it seemed spammy. Yet, many of the items on the
checklist were covered...what gives?

~~~
narcissus
Is it possible that Unbounce landing pages themselves are considered spammy?
You're asking "I followed most of Unbounce's advice when I created a page with
Unbounce... why did it fail?" before asking "is Unbounce's advice correct in
the first place?"

I don't know the answer either way, to be completely honest, but my personal
view is that that particular style of landing page gives the notion that "this
site is such a new idea in my head that I haven't even begun it!". That's my
opinion, anyway.

~~~
kaolinite

       I don't know the answer either way, to be completely honest, but my personal view is that that particular style of landing page gives the notion that "this site is such a new idea in my head that I haven't even begun it!". That's my opinion, anyway.
    

I feel like that in relation to LaunchRock pages now that so many throwaway
projects are using it. Same feeling I get from unthemed Bootstrap sites too.

------
systemtrigger
Better yet, 86 the landing page entirely. Build web technology that doesn't
need an artifice on top of it to dramatize itself. The product is the thing.

~~~
btilly
Why don't you A/B test your theory?

It is tempting to think that a better mouse trap does not need marketing. But
a better mouse trap + marketing beats a better mouse trap every time.

------
salimmadjd
Only if the post followed it's own checklist. I get this is not a landing page
with the intent of capturing new users. But it kind of is. I think the page
layout is funky (I can undertand it's a template), the paragraph's are too
long and the actual list is below the fold. So if you're going to tell the
world how to do a landing page, then show by example.

------
hayksaakian
'And finally, have you ever used Unbounce? (Had to ask).'

Really?

This makes it difficult to take the list seriously; when that is weighted the
same as 'Is it clear who your company is and what you do? (a logo and
tagline)?'

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BasDirks
\+ Is your page accessible to those with disability? \+ Is your markup/CSS/JS
correct? (especially when selling your idea to a tech crowd)

------
rhizome
Degradability would probably be a good feature to have as well. It's a
NoScript/Ghostery/RequestPolicy world.

<http://imgur.com/d2q3s>

~~~
Silhouette
_It's a NoScript/Ghostery/RequestPolicy world._

Sorry, but no, it isn't. Whether it's building their own PCs or running a
custom Linux kernel or installing privacy utilities or using three factor
authentication with a telepathic failsafe for their security system, geeks
tend to _vastly_ overrate their collective importance. In reality, they tend
to represent tiny fractions of any market that isn't specifically built around
geeks by its nature. Most people aren't like geeks.

Now, suppose your new interactive web app doesn't offer a good user experience
without things like JavaScript. Maybe you could make it work up to a point,
but realistically it's never going to be a polished presentation or do
everything the full app could. Now put yourself in management's position,
considering the cost/benefit of implementing a second-rate fallback vs.
allocating the same time and resources to improving the core experience for
almost everyone. Can you imagine how little they care about geeks who
deliberately nerf their own browsers in a way that means they couldn't use
that service anyway and therefore aren't likely to pay the service provider
money either?

(Edit: Incidentally, people in glass houses etc. Your own web site's home
page, under the amusingly ironic headline "passenger: Rails deployment that
just works", appears to be doing anything but working. HTH.)

~~~
rhizome
It does, thanks, though it's not my main concern.

I'm not overrating (really, overestimating) anybody's collective importance, I
simply think degradability is a good idea. When I said it was a "world" like
that, it was that these things exist, and coupled with disability concerns I
work accessibility into everything I do. What is the downside? What of a
contemporary web app is impossible to degrade?

As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics
numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear.

~~~
Silhouette
_What is the downside? What of a contemporary web app is impossible to
degrade?_

I think there are two major downsides.

Firstly, there is the opportunity cost. Any time and money I spend catering to
a niche group who choose not to support modern technologies properly is time
and money I didn't spend improving the experience for everyone else.

Secondly, a lot of web apps are about convenience or entertainment. Beyond a
certain point, a degraded experience isn't quantitatively worse, it's
qualitatively worse, possibly even to the point of effectively making the
entire service worthless.

 _As far as penetration of these plugins go, a comparison of Google Analytics
numbers with raw logfile analysis makes that very clear._

Yes it does. Having done that analysis for the businesses I run, the people
blocking Analytics specifically are a small but noticeable minority, but the
people blocking JavaScript entirely are noise, and quiet noise at that.

Based on that data, when it comes to so-called graceful degradation, we are
far more interested in supporting the significant minority of visitors who
have older versions of IE that don't support things like HTML5 and CSS3 well
than we are in supporting those who nerf a perfectly good modern browser.
YMMV, of course.

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kcwebz
This section resonates with me so much "Interface iteration is more
cumbersome", I am currently working on a project where I have begged and
pleaded to get some type of overall app design/workflow... only to have that
idea thrown out and every other week having to deal with design changes that
means I have to fix several views worth of work.. needless to say its a very
depressing time in my life.

------
nvr219
I think this is a great list. But just because you follow the list doesn't
mean you won't look like a spammer. This is not an attack on ajjuliani.

~~~
jbigelow76
Spamming usually means bombarding some communication channel, email or
craigslist for example, with advertisements or deceptive links to get a
visitor to your landing page. It's all about what happens prior to seeing the
LP.

Once the visitor is on the landing page they are "post-spammed" (if they were
even spammed at all, not all advertisement is spam). Proper landing page
design has zero to do with spamming.

~~~
nvr219
I agree but something can still "look like spam" without being spam.

------
lrem
> Have you optimized your landing page to get a paid search quality score
> above 7?

Anyone can explain this? What's the "paid search quality score"?

~~~
melg
"Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing
page are to a person seeing your ad."
[http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-
GB&...](http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-
GB&answer=2454010) It only matters if you promote a page via Google Adwords.

~~~
riffraff
bing has the same thing, I'd guess it's common.

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jplata
Are people really paying $50-$200/month for landing page testing and
optimization? I get that there appears to be a lot of features, but seems like
overkill to me.

~~~
graeme
If it produces a benefit, that cost is trivial for any business with a
reasonable amount of sales.

1% boost in conversion in a business with $100,000 annual sales = $1000, which
is almost double the price of the lowest plan.

------
mneumegen
How about doing some sort of usability testing on the landing page? It might
be a bit scary putting infront of a REAL customer.

------
joey_muller
Custom headline + no navigation menu + big call to action = big conversion
rate!

