How can design nudge people to do something on the top landing pages of your nonprofit site? In this episode of Whole Whale TV, we talk about “6 Laws of the Landing Page” for nonprofit organizations.
What are landing pages?
The landing page is the first page people hit on your site. Remember- this isn’t necessarily the homepage of your site. In the same way that stores often put up “SALE!” signs on their display windows, you want your front doors to be as pretty as possible. Make sure to design a user friendly landing page to interact with your visitors.
What is a conversion page?
In this training video, we specifically talk about the kind of landing pages where we want users to take action. A conversion page is a page that advertising or campaigns send traffic to with the goal of ‘converting’ people to take an action.
6 Laws of the Landing Page
Content Design
1. Ask for one thing – Authors of the book “Switch”, point out that it’s not laziness that stops users from doing something on your site, but confusion. We can fix this very easily by asking our audience to only do one thing.
2. Back it up – Use social proof to back up the action you want your users to take. DonorsChoose.org is doing just that. In one of their videos we could see Michelle Obama, Oprah, Stephen Colbert, Zac Efron spreading the organization’s message. Let your users know how cool this is, and that they would be missing out otherwise.
Layout Design
3. F it – Yup, F it. Lay out your important content in the shape of an F. Eye tracking studies have shown that most users are used to looking at a page by scanning it down in an F shape.
4. Ask above the fold – You don’t always need a flashy header image on the top of your landing pages. Sometimes, without scrolling, users can already see what is being asked of them. A/B testing, or the process of testing two different versions of a piece of content with your audience and measuring the performance, has shown that including calls-to-action “above the fold” raises engagement as well.
Visual Design
5. Give it a “hero” – A trend these days is to have big images on top of the site. It has been proven that these big images, also known as “hero images,” do in fact, lift engagement . FYI – it’s not a good idea to use stock images, because they just look like unachievable blissful utopia which is far from genuine.
6. Give it some contrast – High contrast colors help you get more engagement on your landing pages. If there’s an action button, you want your users to see it right away.