Efficient Landing Page design or how not to remove “Bad Cinema”

Greetings, friends, colleagues, web designers.

My name is Alexey, and for more than 7 years now I have been creating various kinds of websites. We met.

Today I would like to share with you my vision of the problem of creating bad selling pages, creative crisis of designers, procrastination, and other derivatives of various kinds of fear, caused by ignorance of fundamental things in work.

In this publication, you will not find step-by-step instructions for creating a Landing Page, this resource has written many useful articles that fully reveal the technical aspects of creating selling pages. Here I will set out the fundamental concepts about the design of the LP and the right attitude to work.
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Like many of my colleagues, I started by copying interesting works of interesting designers, trying to repeat in detail the masterpiece, remember the technique of work, “memorize” the elements of the pages. Unfortunately, relatively recently, a year and a half ago, I realized that I did not stop on time. Receiving a new project, I desperately tried to find the necessary patterns in my memory, and, accordingly, apply them in a new design with minimal changes, copy entire blocks without thinking about the goals of the site, its audience and many other important things. This, of course, led to a creative crisis. Often it seemed to me that I was a bad designer and I even had bad dreams. Indeed, having a huge experience of copying, copying, copying, it is quite difficult to switch to “correct thinking”, to the correct tactics when creating website design and other interactive interfaces.

And now a little about the movie.

What is the difference between a good movie and a bad Landing Page

Have you ever made an analogy of creating a Landing Page design with film production or production of other Digital products? Surely not. But if you did, you would find striking similarities and see a lot of interesting things.

How is a movie made? I do not pretend to be a super director, but it is obvious that the process of creating a movie is divided into stages. The first or one of the first is to write a script. Then other stages follow, mostly implementing this scenario, embodying into reality. A well-created and thought-out scenario is more likely to have a good picture in production going on than a written in a hurry, not thought-out, one-sided implementation of the idea of ​​the director.

How a good director (screenwriter) shoots : he writes a script, edits a script, adds details, edits, thinks through, adds a piece to a script, thinks. And so it is repeated 100,500 times, until its preparation is perfect. After that, the picture is taken strictly according to this scenario and the director receives a megaprofit.

How a bad director shoots : wakes up at night from a dream in which he saw something ingenious, something awesome, scratches his bald spot, scribbles the statement of his dream on a piece of paper in a ticker, the next day neither light nor dawn runs to the set, wakes up the poor cleaning grannies and the guard, decorates them and looks like it will look. Then he calls the cast and removes the picture. In the process of filming, he has more and more new "brilliant ideas" and he, without a doubt, cram them into his brainchild. It is not difficult to guess that as a result of his attempts the picture will not turn out to be of the highest quality.

Look at some films, technically - they are at their best, but they don’t carry any quality value. It’s like a designer who is trying to apply everything that is possible in his work, without taking on the essence. Or examples of simple films with a good plot, which for a long time leave a trace in memory.

Many designers in developing Landing Page makes the same mistake. Or rather, mistakes.

Landing Page is a movie with its own script, with its own audience. As you probably guessed, the script here is a prototype, a sketch of the site, and shooting is a visualization or, in common, design. Although the design begins at the design stage.

Very often, designers, having caught fire on some interesting, ingenious idea, kill the high-quality implementation of the project, stuffing their work with “fast” patterns, creating graphic visualization during the whole work, not working on the script, on the prototype of the selling page, but this is a big mistake .

Haste has never led to good results, especially in the manufacture of digital products with a multitude of stages, each of which should be performed at the highest level at its own level. Someone, perhaps, simply does not consider it necessary to spend time on prototyping, thinking that this is an extra step, because everything is in my head, the picture is, as they say. But, unfortunately, this leads to disastrous consequences, creative stagnation, procrastination, and much more bad.

And how to do?

First you need to understand (minute of the captain, but still):

1) You need to know your audience. It is best to sit in a chair in front of the fireplace before designing a prototype, close your eyes and imagine yourself as a fat, kind grandfather who is looking for a universal cure for old age and suddenly came across an interesting page on the Internet with a big button and beautiful pictures. Feel what he wants? Text, the blocks themselves will pour, believe me. The script will flow like music;

2) The prototype is not the final design. You need to understand this in order not to get carried away in the process of prototyping and suddenly you will not start to choose which font will look prettier in the title;

3) Once again look at the prototype and redo everything only after you make sure that everything is really beautiful and harmonious, everything is in its place, proceed to the drawing of the prototype. Yes, it is drawing. Creativity is over.

All success, thank you for your attention!