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25 Comments

Is there a need for more beautiful landing pages?

If you use a website builder to make landing pages, are you happy with the results? Were you able to do what you wanted?

The IH community seems to love Tailwind UI, how does this compare to Wix and Wordpress?

I'm working with different types of websites and would love to know what you think.

  1. 5

    I'm a front-end engineer and tend to do everything custom. For my app, I made the landing page as fancy as I could.

    It got us a few viral posts on reddit just about the landing page design. In the end it was worth it as it gives us free press.

    Also made me think of a pivot where we sell landing pages and not just logos 😅

    There's clearly an appetite for more fancy landing pages.

    1. 2

      Your product is incredible!

  2. 3

    I actually took the opposite path with https://smol.pub and made a landing page as simple and boring as possible.

    1. 1

      I love how bold it is, I was thinking of putting something similar out there. How is the response to this ? Maybe it works because it's focused on writers?

      1. 1

        Thanks, I appreciate it. :) Response has been positive so far. Writers tend to give more value to words than visuals, so I think that's definitely a reason why it resonates.

  3. 2

    One big drawback I see is almost all landing pages looks similar.

  4. 2

    The message of your landing page is much important than the design.
    And keep in mind, good design doesn't always mean beautiful design.
    Different people like different things.
    If your audience are the elderly, the best design you can give is actually something more like html simple design (yes, even if it looks terrible, that's because this demographics understand the message of your product that way better, this demographics don't trust too beautiful of a design, they are used to read ugly newspapers, not watch beautiful girls on tinder)
    And Im not just saying that, I have tested it myself. I had a landing page that converted at 2% I made the design uglier but simple, and it started converting at 7% because it was strict focus on the message and CTA)

    1. 1

      For one of my clients, my target audience was the elderly. I had to scrap the 'fancy' design in favour of simple pages with large fonts.

  5. 2

    You are focused on design and look, and that is fine. I will just add one more angle to the same niche.

    • Is there a need for more effective landing pages?

    So instead focus on the look, how about focus on UX and conversion rate? That might not be your cup of tea, so anyone can use this question as a starting point to a business model.

    1. 1

      I think conversions is a good point, it aligns with client goals to increase traffic.

  6. 1

    You can build something really nice and fast in WordPress using Gutenberg blocks like Stackable or Generateblocks. Some themes are so fast nowadays too like GeneratePress, Blocksy, Kadence.

    https://swipepages.com/ is great too, they had a good deal on appsumo before so they might run again.

  7. 1

    Excellent question! I'd say that overall the issue isn't beauty but effectiveness - and there's really no way to do that well unless you're actively testing the homepage with your prospective users. Every audience responds well to different things, and some will actively mistrust overly 'beautiful' sites.
    (Side note, I personally use Webflow to build simple landing sites for my clients as I'm not yet strong enough to custom code anything, but it can output clean code to be used later if needed, and is super customisable.)

    1. 1

      Why is this an excellent question? Is this a common misconception that web designers have?

      It seems like keeping the design simple and focusing on conversions/leads/traffic generation is most important.

      1. 1

        From my experience, it is a common misconception that product developers / other types of founders who are designing for web have. Any web designer worth their title knows that they should, first and foremost be designing for the target audience, so it seems super obvious. But if web design isn't your speciality, then it's not always so obvious and it can get easy to get caught up in trends or 'needing to look different'.
        Sounds like you have a great handle on it though, do you ever come across clients who want 'beautiful' over 'functional' ?

  8. 1

    I'd say the best landing page is one that converts. If it's "ugly" but converts really well, it achieved the same goal (for the most part...some places do need a nicer aesthetic).

    You can see clickfunnels and how a lot of those websites look really horrible, but for a lot of marketers that's the "go to" platform for setting up a squeeze page.

  9. 1

    Carrd.co offers simple yet beautifully designed single-page websites. Highly recommend. But as others have mentioned, it does mean everyone ends up with pages that are somewhat similar.

  10. 1

    Look at almost any LP for SaaS products, they look nearly identical. I think there is currently a "golden standard" for LP design that most companies implement. Yeah there are different graphics and structure is different, but in a world of uniformity, content is what matters

    1. 1

      Maybe after the LP design has reached a certain threshold where it does its job sufficiently, copywriting becomes the differentiator?

  11. 1

    I think there is...there's something to be said for creativity and art amongst all the data and optimisation. But I do think it depends on your product and audience.

    1. 1

      True, there are so many facets to optimise for.

  12. 0

    Huge gap, i'm currently working with 5 world class template builders for new UI kits that are unique (TailwindUI is amazing but everyone has the same site).

    1. 1

      What sort of websites are you making? Blogs? E-commerce? or simple landing pages?

      1. 1

        Landing pages, marketing sites, blogs, knowledge bases and changelogs.

        Anything a SaaS company needs. But we have personal blogs on the platform (https://versoly.com/) as well.

        1. 1

          Thanks, I'll check it out.

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