After my initial review for e-releases and PRWeb.com landing pages, I went back for a second look at both pages…

A Second Chance: Things are not always as they seem

I looked again at eReleases.com, but this time presumed that not everyone bails out in the first few seconds after opening a page like this:

• Headline – if you get over the design and highlighting, the headline does an excellent job of clearly stating the value proposition. Not a bad thing.

• The Chart – again, once we get around its brashness, it highlights well the features of the eReleases.com service and costs versus the competition. (Although, using a term like “Competitor A” instead of an actual competitor reduces the credibility of the information)

• The logos on the right – That’s the New York Times there, not to mention USA Today and Yahoo! Along with the BBB logo in the upper right, these are major icons of trust and familiarity for a press release service.

• Below the fold – the copy is bulleted for quick scanning.

• Form – one of the shortest forms I’ve seen and this should minimize any form fear visitors may have.

• Call to Action Button – stands-out and clearly states what will happen when clicked. Very nice.

• Testimonial – perhaps a little late, it probably should go above the CTA button and above the fold. But, it’s nice to have and it does the job of improving trust in the service.

A similar second look at PRweb.com shows that, even with landing pages, beauty might be only skin deep:

• Headline – well placed and spaced, but, on the second read, I realized the headline only tells you what anyone sending a press release would already know – press releases should grab attention, build traffic/customers and boost business, it’s basic public relations. The headline would do better to highlight a more specific or unique value proposition, like “PRWeb designs your press release to take advantage of the new web ecosystem”

• Image – It’s eye-catching, but does it get across any key messages? It’s one of those incongruous compositions – “businessperson on a rodeo bull” sort of thing – but does it get across the idea of broadcasting a message to a lot of people?

• Nice testimonials – that is, if you are a speed-reader. The testimonial crawl is too fast and only the static testimonial is easily readable.

• The copy – this is the first landing page I’ve come across that converts from a short-copy to a long-copy page at a mouse click. The clickable arrows lead to bullet points. An interesting device, except that the call-to-action button sets below the fold when any bulleted section is expanded. The arrows create another annoyance by needing to be clicked once to expand and once to contract each bulleted section. If you want to open and close each bulleted section, that’s a total of eight clicks – not for me, I’m gone.

• Video – It’s not until I’m half-way through the video for a second time that I hear the announcer mention the New York Times. Why bury this important credibility element in a video that you must leave the landing page to watch?

• Call-to-Action button – even if we forgive it for sliding below the fold as we expand the copy, it looks like a leftover from Windows95. The form title says “Create Your Account Now” and the button is labeled “Register” – it’s difficult for me to understand why someone would go to all the trouble to design a beautiful site, get multiple testimonials and produce a clever video – and then use a gray button labeled “Register” for the single most important element of the page.

Conclusion?

So which one wins? What I thought was the better site might be the worse one and the one I thought worse, might be better. Is it better to have a good looking page that falls short on other elements, or an ugly page that might have more elements, but they are poorly presented?

Maybe it’s not for me to say – it should be determined by testing and the CTR numbers. But, if I had to pick a winner, the better looking site takes it because it is more likely to keep surfers on the page for longer, however, this page is still not a “winner” because a good first impression needs to be followed up with similar efforts in all other aspects of the landing page.

So why are so many landing pages ugly?!

There are a lot of points I didn’t cover (the URL’s for both pages are paragraph length) and I would really like to get your feed back on these two pages – or any others – and the points I outlined.