Website, & Landing Page Design Best Practices, Tips

Landing Page Design Best Practices
The first generation Landing page best practices

• Most of the fields on the form were required. 
• The “submit” button was still in fashion. 
• Payoff for filling out the form - A phone call from a sales rep.

The second generation Landing Page Best practices

Best practices included:

• A/B and multivariate (MVT) testing — test, test, test your ideas
• “message match” continuity between ads/emails and their landing pages
• shorter and friendlier forms with better calls-to-action (CTAs)
• emphasis on text content (not Flash!) to improve SEO and quality scores
• “social proof” with logos, awards, certifications, testimonials, etc.
• Broad summary of the most universal landing page best practices of the time:

Current Landing Pages Best Practices
Higher set of principles:

1. Deliver meaningful, context-relevant content
2. Present that content with an engaging, affective design
3. Offer a compelling, but not coercive, “next step” to take

An Example Of current Landing Pages Landing page for an online game called Dragons of Atlantis:

It violates several earlier landing page best practices

• Uses large images — in the background, in the foreground, in pop-up lightboxes. 
• It actually uses a slide show of images — gasp! — in that main window, rotating one after another every few seconds.

Advantages

• The images sell the experience of the game itself.
• They’re lightly annotated just enough to communicate the essence of game play. 
• The rotator tells a story with them in a succinct and captivating way.
• It may take a second or two for this page to load on a fast connection, but it enchants respondents enough to sign-up
• Those large images are being served via a content delivery network (CDN), and the image rotator is not Flash-based but driven by lightweight Javascript.
• Other Landing Page rules are still observed: short form, clear call-to-action, the highlighted “free to play” value proposition, a strategic sliver of social proof. 
• It’s a hybrid of solid fundamentals and creative departures from the old school.

Website Design Best Practices & Tips
The following Mint Leaf Studio infographic gives some best practices and tips for improving your website design in 12 simple steps.

• The 12 improvements include search functionality, navigation, typography, security and SEO. 
• Interesting facts regarding Navigation which can be improved using these best practices: People cant find what they are looking for on websites 60% of times
• Interesting facts regarding Internal search which can be improved using these best practices: 80% people leave a website if internal search performs poorly. 
• Adding a blog can improve number of visitors, inbound links and indexed pages significantly
• Fact regarding Design best practices: Visual design is reflective of your brand
• Fact regarding Typography: Typography directly determines readability 
• Fact regarding Button Design best practices: Buttons can directly influence and improve conversion
• 21% of users abandon shopping cart due to concerns of personal data safety
• Consumers are 2.8 times more likely to search for a brand's product when they see a brand both in paid search and social media than without seeing it in Social Media. 
• Example of SEO improvement:Some 62% of people click on a search result from the first page of results. If you do a better job thinking about optimizing search results, you can significantly boost your traffic numbers.