[andkon]

I've been a senior product marketer at Heroku and Realm (AKA the person responsible for leading the creation of product landing pages), and I gotta counsel y'all: when you're looking at landing pages, what makes them great has a lot less to do with the visual design, and a lot more to do with the story and message they tell.

They're fundamentally narrative media: a landing page proceeds serially from top to bottom. What you see first matters most; like every good story, it also needs to give you a reason to proceed down the page.

It's great when they converge — where the visual design, structure of the page and the copy itself all come together in a beautiful statement of the brand's values and the product's value propositions. But none of that can happen without a story that resonates powerfully with the people who it should matter to. On a cursory examination of landing pages, it's easy to forget that they're speaking directly to a specific group, and miss the real magic simply because you aren't in that group.

edit: apparently HN disagrees

[pryelluw]

Spot on. The highest converting landing page I have ever done was downright ugly. However, it made thousands of dollars with just a headline, a paragraph, and a buy now button.

People often confuse visually pleasing with financially pleasing.

[moeamaya]

Partially agree.

Willing to put a bet down you could 3x traffic/conversion with design improvement.

[Gustomaximus]

Without knowing any existing pages or stats from the original page this claim is weak bravado.

I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.

[moeamaya]

Even more than bravado, I’ve dedicated my entire life’s work to this claim.

Design is incredibly undervalued on HN, and I make contrarian claims to not only ruffle a few feathers, but because it’s a fundamental thesis of mine.

Note aesthetics are also a functional beauty to me, I enjoy both refactoring code and typesetting a landing page as part of the design process.

[andkon]

I feel like my original answer ended up playing to that tendency to undervalue design here. Which ain't great. I guess my point was that it's super easy to look at a design and feel like it looks great and miss the fact that design is developed closer to the conclusion of a process that begins with developing a compelling message and story. Because folks miss that, "what's a great landing page?" is a question that usually ends up delivering a lot of landing pages that look the dopest, appeal to the most people, whose design and message is accessible, rather than landing pages that are actually successful at doing what they need to do (which may fly right by folks not in the intended audience).

Fwiw, I think you're right. 3x is probably what the match of design and message results in, especially because a lot of what software does can't be described merely in words. It needs design to put the accent on the right things, or else will fail to communicate (most of the time).

[majewsky]

> Design is incredibly undervalued on HN

Looks like we're reading different HNs.

[mrhappyunhappy]

Not really. I can concur with HN and developers in general not giving a shit about design. I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve spoken to who tried launching their own product only to go silent after I sent them a design proposal. Devs seem to have a very limited understanding of value of design.

[pryelluw]

Could you provide some concrete examples? I see you work at a marketing agency in SF. That probably means you could have some good ones to share. Like a/b comparisons of pages that saw such improvements.

Not sarcasm or passive agreesivesness. I'm genuinely interested in the data from someone in an agency.

[moeamaya]

No aggression perceived.

The best client example is Groove (https://www.groovehq.com/). In 2014 they hired us to take the existing site (https://web.archive.org/web/20141223145657/https://www.groov...) and make it attractive to serious customers who can "trust" their company based on the site. Went from 1M ARR to 5M in 18 months.

A more concrete personal example is when we ranked "HTML Color Codes" with essentially zero feature improvements beyond nice UI/UX. Now ranked #1 in Google for several queries...making $5k/mo passively. More detailed write up on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-to-1-300-mo-b...).

[sah2ed]

Nice that you posted client examples.

I think your examples do not really prove the role of visual design conclusively because in the 18 month time-frame, the folks at Groove must have had several efforts running concurrently with the explicit goal of increasing revenue. The web site facelift you were engaged for happened to be one of the steps they took towards that goal.

For instance, they would have intensified sales, marketing, customer success, fixed bugs in the product etc in addition to the revamped website, so we can't really pin the significant jump in revenue from $1m to $5m on visual refresh alone.

Not trying to diminsh the work that you did, merely trying to put things in perspective because our tendencies as humans is to misattribute causation, which is bound to happen if all contributing factors to a thing's success are not properly considered.

[moeamaya]

Agreed.

Client examples are indeed impossible to determine direct outcomes. But to add context, they added two team members in that time but the largest change came from landing larger clients, which was the whole point of the redesign.

Also added the personal example as a more controlled experiment to show the value that design can have.

[morpheuskafka]

I really like your phrasing, "serious customers who can "trust" their company based on the site." Design isn't a "bell and whistle," it's the first impression of your product and the first opportunity to stand out. Someone who invests in good design has shared values with me, is willing to make permanent investments in there company, and is confident in their image and their product.

[rtx]

Hey Moe its ok if you are not comfortable answering this. What would be the ballpark budget for this kind of work.

[mrhappyunhappy]

The fact that you ask disqualifies you.

[z3t4]

While I do think your design is good. I think the main reason you got more conversions are that you put more focus on social proof, so instead of showing technical details you show how many are using the software as well as a smiling face of satisfied customers.

[dorgo]

can you elaborate on colors (Groove)? Why does the landing page has orange, green + two shades of blue? Blue is in their logo, but red is missing. Instead there are orange and green. I have little to no experience in visual design. But intuitivelly I would expect fewer colors and better adjusted to match brand colors.

[etattva]

agree

[mrhappyunhappy]

Just the other day I threw together a landing page for a whale watch crypto app and posted about it on Facebook. It had a conversation rate of 70%, an oddity I’ve never before accomplished. Point being, it’s all about relevance to a very very specific audience.

[zenmaster408]

I agree that the messaging and story are the most important components. But you still need to have a clean and elegant design to get people to consume the story and message. You can make the content more digestible by making use of white spaces, having adequate line height and line width, including appropriate imageries and graphics, and using lots of bullets. If the page is too ugly or too overwhelming with texts, more readers will bounce.

[newman8r]

What are your thoughts about showing pricing on the landing page?

[notahacker]

Depends on what you're selling, how complicated the pricing structure is and whether price is likely to be a major factor in people saying "yes" to your product.

And above all whether the goal is to get people to click the "buy" button, to get people trying the service to see how much they might need it or to get people to contact your enterprise sales team

[andkon]

I feel like most of the time, pricing decisions involve a lot of information and it feels like a digression to have it all on one page. For simple apps and pricing structures, it's doable — my Rdio-to-Spotify app was $5, and said so up front – but the point of the landing page is to help someone decide if you're useful to them or not. Get them to the "yes, if" stage before showing them pricing, imo.

[dbg31415]

Be upfront with your price.

Price is a data point a customer needs to make the decision.

Give them all data points you can.

[a13n]

It's not that simple. Some businesses would lose a fortune if they started pricing this way.

Particularly if you sell to enterprises. Many companies will make more money by sizing them up and giving them an optimal custom price.

[Angostura]

As long as your explicitly factor in the number of sales being lost in the calculation

[mrhappyunhappy]

Bad advice. While this works in some cases, you’d lose a lot of money on some products because the would be customer has not realized the full value of your product. A product generating 500% roi may mean $100 to one business and 1 million to another - should they pay the same price?

[2474]

Like andkon said, convince me that your product is something I need or compel me to need it. I might hit your landing page with little to no prior information.

If I can't be convinced your product is worth my time, does price even matter at that point?

[Ilikeruby]

Wait.. Heroku has a Landing page?