Landing Page Vs Direct Access? - The Dilemma!

It depends.

Some version of a landing page can be exponentially better than direct access and vice versa. It depends a lot on the quality of what you put out there.

A landing page has the benefit of being better for SEO and can be less overwhelming as it gives you the power to summarize your product. The downside is that you have to be an excellent copywriter and have a good design for it to catch people's attention, so they read what it's all about.

Direct access can be more effective at capturing people by allowing them to begin working, then need to create an account to save their work. Using loss aversion is a good tactic. The downside here being if it's not clear what they are supposed to do when arriving at the product, users will probably be overwhelmed and bounce.

I'm attempting to do a hybrid of these approaches with Polished. There's a landing page with 'try it' calls to action. Clicking those take you right into a demo of the app and people can begin using it right away without creating an account. I'm still working on building the account creation bit so TBD on how that works.

I remember coming across Codecademy for the first time a few years ago. At the time there was a little terminal on their landing page with a flashing message that was something like 'Type your name and hit enter'. So I did, and then a new message popped up saying 'Congratulations, you just created your first javascript variable', followed by another instruction. So I kept going and was eventually taken into the full app and prompted to create an account. I ended up completing the full course.

I'm usually the kind of person that finds something like Codecademy, says "that's cool", bookmarks it for later and never returns. I'd never written a line of code in my life before finding Codecademy, and now I work as a software developer and write javascript every day. So that idea of having an interactive demo as the first thing on the landing page has stuck with me, and I'm trying to do a similar thing with my project Composable.art.

At the moment the fully functioning app is right there in the hero of the landing page, but I may change that when there are more features and complexity. I think if you have the opportunity to get people using your product in some way without even leaving the page, that's a brilliant onboarding strategy.

I think the reason for the dedicated landing page is that there are three types of users you have to consider:

1. Existing users
2. New potential users
3. Google bot

The first group would be fine being dumped into the app immediately, but the second two would benefit from a landing page explaining where they are and what the app does and why they should care.

I like to be able to get up and running quickly to see if the product is a good fit. I think www.carrd.io does this very well. It allows you to start building straight away without entering any information. @ajlkn talks about this in the Podcast and mentions that it has been very effective.

Agree, I personally prefer direct access but assume landing page converts better as everyone does it (and you’d think the larger firms have tested it).

Related discussion: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/change-to-a-conventional-landing-page-or-keep-what-ive-got-ea70f219e7

Most people’s advise seemed to be test both and failing that err on side of landing page not direct access. I’m now going to change to a conventional landing page for https://www.influencegrid.com/ and see how it goes.