Differentiating between website and landing pages for superior results

Anybody who is aware about the world of website design and development, must have come across the term Landing Page, a tad too often. But have we ever wondered, what exactly does a landing page means? Even more so, how is it different from the other pages of the website and most importantly, why does the web design and development experts emphasis on developing a landing page, optimizing the same for better results.

In this write up, we shall understand the meaning of the landing pages, differentiate it from the other website's pages and learn the importance of the same.

A business website is a collection of pages

A complete business web design comprises of various pages. If you own a complete website, you must have various pages in it, for instance the homepage, the about us page, Products and Service page, and the page addressing Frequently Asked Questions etc.

Landing page is a single page

Straightly put, landing page is just one of the pages in the website. It is a single most optimized page which is being strictly designed to cater one specific purpose and has a single goal. This goal could be to sell the products and services, to push sign ups, to address various inquiries etc.

Homepage also acts as the landing page

The homepage of the website, by default acts out to be the landing page as well. However, it is not necessary that the landing page, shall always be the homepage of the website. In fact, in practice, the price and services or the products and services page is the landing page for a website. By targeting the same page through various paid and unpaid optimization methods, one can direct the visitors to land on the landing page and directly do what is anticipated from them.

However, a user may reach the website through various sources. You cannot target each and every source to direct the users towards the landing page. Thus, even if you are not targeting at your home page, it still acts like the landing page. It is in most of the cases, the first page any of the user would see and hence it must contain the precise and effective summary of the entire business undertakings.

Thus, not only you need to optimize the landing page, but also make the homepage of your website effective, enriched with keywords and key phrases, and optimize the content so that all of the business activities are mentioned in it.

Landing page could be a single page or multiple pages

Undoubtedly the homepage is the page where most of the users are expected to land. However, the landing page could be a single page of the complete business web design. As told above, it is usually the products and services page, or the price and sign up page, whose major task is just to generate more leads and call for instant action on the parts of the users.

However, it is not required that the landing page could be a single most page. A business website design may consists of a collection of landing pages. For instance if some one is dealing with cars, he may have two separate landing pages – one dealing with the sale of cars and other dealing with car repairs and maintenance etc.

Developing a good landing page

A good landing page is what gives the customers with complete information, so that they would not have to look any further. It must be concise, meaningful and specific in purpose. You may hire a custom web development company, to build glorious websites, with highly effective and action oriented landing pages.

By Pixelcrayons

Read More

Which Ecommerce service you should choose for your store?

Getting an online store in the present time is imperative. The wide spread popularity of ecommerce portals and stores have now provided the business owners an easy and superlatively cost effective way to market and sell their products online. However, the problem creeps in when the online store aspirants have to make the choice between which service to choose. We have break the problem down for you and have reviewed 4 of the top ecommerce website development platforms. Check out the positives and negatives of the same and make the right choice for your online store.

1. OsCommerce

http://www.oscommerce.com

OsCommerce is a preferred choice for a lot of online store owners and the list of noteworthy users includes – LinuxUk and TruffleShuffle.

The impressive features of OsCommerce includes multiple payment options. It supports a variety of payment gateways including – 2Checkout.com, PayNova, PayPal, Authorize.Net, TrustCommerce, SecPay, PSIGate, ChronoPay and iPayment etc.

Features Overview:

• The features of OsCommerce includes:
• Unlimited support to products and categories
• Multiple currency support.
• Back end supported by sturdy object oriented PHP
• Support both the products – the ones which are downloaded / virtual and the ones that are shipped / physical. 

The problem with using OsCommerce is that the front end of OcCommerce is not developed using CSS (cascading style sheet language) and thus it is a huge problem to skin and reskin the pages. However if you are more comfortable with using tables in the website development, OsCommerce is for you.

Another advantage of OcCommerce is that it is immensely popular and thus you get support of the online community backing up OsCommerce.

2. ZenCart
http://www.zencart.com

Getting straight to the point, ZenCart may not support as many payment options as OsCommerce, but when compared to the above ecommerce publishing solution, Zencart turns out to be a more mature and functional solution. Where OsCommerce takes a lot of time to fix certain necessary issues requiring immediate attention, ZenCart fixes the same on an urgent basis. One of these issues is safety of the online store.

ZenCart is basically an extension to OsCommerce, thus the users can expect a kind of similar features and attributes. When it comes to payment gateways, ZenCart supports – Authorize.Net, LinkPoint and PayPal etc.

Features Overview of ZenCart:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation to the user front end
• The coding changes being conducted in PHP are completely protected during upgrades via in built protection system, which is integrated with phpBB.
• Integration with phpBB
• Controlling the Meta Tags and descriptions at the “per product” level. 

3. VirtueMart

http://www.virtuemart.net

vitrueMart is perhaps the best solution available to you in case your web applications are based on Joomla or mambo for that matter. Both Joomla and VirtueMart are built with PHP, and thus VirtueMart works wonders in a PHP / MySQL platform.

Features Overview of VirtueMart

• control the Products and Items at the stock level
• Products overview is powered by AJAX and thus the new products can be easily and immediately added to the cart.
• You can add the Product Attributes such as Size or Color to the Products
• Easily Manage multiple States, Countries and Currencies
• Demonstrate availability of the products
• Multiple Payment Gateways Support.
• Easy Integration with Joomla – if you have a functional Joomla website, Integration is done within or less than 5 minutes.

4. Magento

http://www.magentocommerce.com

Magento is the dedicated piece of work of Varien, a web development firm situated in Los Angeles, and if we may so say, what a marvel they have produced. It is by far the best open source ecommerce web development platform and has certain really exciting features. It is evident that the developers at Varien have thought of each and every anticipated attribute and contained it in the website design. Price and product comparison, wishlists, shop by category and price etc, these are the certain much sought after features and you get the same in Magento.

Features Overview

• Really, it was overwhelming to include all the features of Magento in the list, however we have mentioned a few essentials. For a detailed look, flock the website.
• Google Analytics Integration
• Options for Multiple images per product with a refined Zoom in viewing
• Addition to the wishlists
• Catalog importing and exporting in a batch
• Checkout in a single page
• Multiple language and currencies support

The Ultimate Choice:
Let us begin with a disappointing answer – the best choice is dependent on your own requirements. Disappointing as it may sound, it is true nonetheless. Clearly Magento wins over the rest of the platforms, but for a specific requirement, go with the specific solution. Like if you have a Joomla website, you know the solution is VirtueMart.

Read More