My landing-page-in-a-day challenge – done.

We’ve worked with many marketing consultants over the years. We like it because it means we don’t have to chase after new clients. Which means we just get on and design compelling campaigns and deliverables, which is what we are best at.

It is easy to see why consultants work with us. They get a valuable extra revenue stream, a dedicated design team with no overheads and a full range of design services. What more could they want? It is no secret that we’d like to work with more consultants, so I wanted to create a quick landing page to highlight that fact and try to drive requests.

I wanted to do something in one day, as quickly as I could with minimum fuss. It is quite a useful strategy as it restricts your options so you make decisive decisions easier, rather that leaving the hard bits until tomorrow (manana, manana).

Copy

So, this morning I scoped the page and its contents.

I wanted the following key elements on the page:

attention-grabbing headline
a short paragraph with key bullets
an image
testimonials
a short form
a call to action.

I wrote the copy and edited it down so that it was nice and concise. I fired it over to Wordy to have it copy-edited (which took 16 minutes).

So my copy was done, but I now needed to turn my concentration to an image of some kind.

Imagery

I had in my head an old video from my Apple TV when it started up, a video of lots of images like a bank of TV screens. It has been done quite a lot, but for some reason I still really like it. I wanted all the small images to be work we had done, but I didn’t have time to create all the individual images. Our website has some portfolio items, so I decided to reuse these.

To get the effect I wanted I could have used Photoshop, but I only had a short time frame. So I fired up the App Store on my Mac and had a quick look. I figured if I could make a quick collage of images from our portfolio items, I could find another app to bend it into the required shape and output a nice .png file. I found both on the App Store. The first makes very simple collages from images (Collage Creator – FREE) and the other bends and reflects images (3D Image Commander – £5.99).

I dragged images from my website into a folder, dropped the folder into Collage Creator, exported a .png file, dropped that into Image Commander, and then exported another .png file of the final image. The whole process took about 30 minutes including downloading the apps. So, image done!

Build

Now I had to build the landing page. Here at Matizmo we use Unbounce, an excellent landing page platform. Normally for clients we create pages to their exact requirements to match their existing website and brand. In this case I wanted a quick fix, so I selected one of the Unbounce templates, a dark template that I was going to use as a starting point (and modify significantly).

I uploaded all my images and my copy and built the page — I was relying on a quick sketch I had done in my pad to put everything in the right places. I set the form to deliver the request to my email address.

I had no time to worry about finite details. The site worked and looked pretty good. I had a concern that the main image was a bit too big in terms of file size, but I could fix that at a later date if it became a problem.

I created a custom sub domain and added a CNAME to my hosting provider so that the site would look on-brand.

I did a few quick tests and put the site live.  You can see it in all its glory here: Matizmo Consultants Landing Page.

So all this took most of the day, and I still had time to write this blog post. I must stress that this is not perfect, but it’s done and live, rather than being on my to-do list still!  Sound off in the comments and let me know your thoughts.