Sorry it has taken me so long to post here. We just got back into the swing of things here at Georgia Tech, and between fraternity rush (I’m a Pi Kappa Phi by the way) and getting my schedule figured out I have had absolutely no time. Hopefully I can catch up here sometime soon.

Anyway…here goes. I decided to pickup a new project for a pretty interesting company. They are called Expedient and they are in the Document Management arena. Their ideas truly are revolutionary, just as the website I am making for them will be.

One of their requests is to construct a landing page. You know, the page before the site that gets the companies message across as quickly and efficiently as possible. A few great examples would be Wufoo.com and even ups.com. They are clean, elegant and to the point. I ran into a few questions and concerns when doing this though. Check out UPS.com’s landing page.

Notice how simple it is? Granted, they are celebrating their 100 year anniversary and it usually doesn’t look like that, but it’s truly beautiful in my opinion. So I started designing my clients landing page with this in mind. Next, it hit me…it can’t be done. UPS already has huge amounts of exposure. It’s one of the top 10 recognized corporate logo’s in the world. Everyone knows what UPS does, so they don’t need to send a message. They can just make it appealing to the eye and celebrate a special occasion if they wish.

So what do other companies do. Is UPS the only recognized company that designs their landing pages this way? NO WAY! Coca-Cola, Mcdonalds, and even Nokia do similar things. Granted, I know these landing pages are also intersections for their international sites, but who cares. It’s not easy to tell what each of the listed companies do just by getting to their landing page. Everyone knows you only have a few seconds to get your viewers attention, unless your viewers are coming TO you because they already KNOW what you do. Therefore, you can not duplicate what these monsters have done for your own business or design. There’s just no way. Just to solidify my stance, how about companies that change roles. Can you be so well known and so heavily in the news that you don’t have to let viewers know on your landing page that you have changed? IBM is the perfect example. They no longer sell home computing systems, but you can see from previous versions of their site, and the current ibm.com landing page that no a whole lot has changed. Granted, they have always been into business consulting, but the landing page never once transformed.

After much thought, and several revisions, here’s what I came up with for the Expedient landing page. Please pardon the poor quality, I’m using a computer without my usual Photoshop. I’ll fix it later.

It can also be viewed on my development server

As you can see, I tried to keep it simplistic, but still informative. I decided to inform the visitor, but not overwhelm them. It was also decided to add some sections to the landing page that would make the visitor want to learn more and dig deeper. I really liked the way it turned out. Of course this is ever evolving and will probably change some, but I really feel as if this was a great design for what we wanted to accomplish.

So how can you use this in your next project? Well…its pretty easy, and has a lot of the same attributes as the sites I design.

1. Clean - You don’t want to bombard the reader flying pictures and crazy scrolling effects. (Read Here if You Forgot). One site I came across was Pepsi.com. It’s cool and "hip", since that is their target audience, but it even overwhelms me a little bit, and I’m still in college.
2. To the Point - There’s absolutely no need to useless text on a landing page. I always like to think of them as what a corporate executive would use to base his decision to use your company or a competitors. Let’s face it, your customers are busy people and they don’t have time to sit and pillage through an entire website to figure what your all about. Cut to the chase and get to the point! If it takes longer than 30seconds to read through your landing page, scrap it and try again.
3. Strikes Curiosity - Your landing page is just that, a landing page! You need to spark that flame of curiosity in your viewer and make them want to find out more. The goal is to get them to your main site, which is hopefully just as nice as your landing page.

One last word of wisdom…your landing pages should fit the theme of your site and should always be designed around your site, not the other way around. It’s a hell of a lot easier to change a landing page, than to change a whole site.

Developing this site is more of an experiment for me that anything else. After running across site after site of truly horrible layouts and usability, I decided to take my try at it. There were three questions that came to mind when I first started this…

1. What are the components that make up an "efficently" designed site.
2. How can I take everything I have come across and create a hybrid site that takes the best of all the good sites.
3. Finally, can I even do it?

So far, I have yet to answer all of those questions. Only number 3 has somewhat of a response…I can KIND OF do this. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Development

Web development is always a hot topic on the net. How you code, and how efficiently you stick to plans could make the difference between a good and a GREAT site. Should I use a framework, should I create everything from scratch, how many CSS style sheets should I have…all these are questions without a specific answer. What you do, and how you do it, is up to the web developer and their own style.

Usability

What about usability? Well, it’s pretty apparent where the internet is going. It’s migrating to a stateless field where websites will be totally dynamic and tuned to a specific users wants and requirements. The days of a one site for all are LONG gone. With the emergence of Web 2.0 (which is a highly over used word I might add), users want total control over their experience, along with a way to interact with whatever medium they are in. No longer do we just want a site that holds all our bookmarks, we want a place where we can vote, comment, and track everything and anything we deem necessary. We also want to have the ability to know what the Smith’s next door are viewing as well….hence the SOCIAL trend we are seeing in every main site. Take the current list of top 20 sites from Alexa that I grabbed at the time of this article’s posting.

Rank	Change	Web Site
1	(none)	yahoo.com
2	(none)	msn.com
3	(none)	google.com
4	(none)	youtube.com
5	1	live.com
6	1	myspace.com
7	(none)	baidu.com
8	(none)	orkut.com
9	1	wikipedia.org
10	1	qq.com
11	6	hi5.com
12	7	facebook.com
13	1	megaupload.com
14	4	rapidshare.com
15	(none)	blogger.com
16	4	microsoft.com
17	6	yahoo.co.jp
18	5	sina.com.cn
19	6	friendster.com
20	4	ebay.com

 All the sites highlighted fit my definition of web 2.0. As you can see, 40% of the top sites from Alexa are community driven sites, just like what I described above. You can also stretch this number to at least 50%, depending on how you define interaction and your opinion on what’s web 2.0.

Interface

I mentioned above the trend everyone sees in regards to the future of everyone’s browsing the web. One word can sum it up; STATELESS. From here on out you will start to see more and more web sites utilizing a combination of asynchronious procedures and DHTML (AJAX) to achieve this stateless, and ideal, internet. No more will a form.sumbit() be necessary….just the call to a xhtmlhttprequest object that will send and receive data, which will occur totally transparently to the user. Just as an example, goto your gmail account. Notice that no matter what you do, goto new mail, change folders, delete a message, the address stays the same. That’s because everything on gmail is done AJAX style. Pretty impressive huh?!

Remember, not everything needs to be AJAX. If it doesn’t impreove the users experience on your site, then don’t do it. Just because it’s "cool" doesn’t mean its absolutely necessary. form.Submit() is the same from browser to brower, but using AJAX could run you into some browser compatability issues. For example, the onclick event for a div behaves a bit differently in Firefox than IE if you have an object or embed within that div. Just be careful not to alienate some of your visitors.

I’ve also noticed that the simpler the site, the better chance you have and success. The mySpace vs. Facebook fight is proof. Slowly, but surely, mySpace is falling from the top Alexa ranks, while Facebook continues its climb. It’s only a matter of time before the simpler, less clutterd, and more interactive Facebook conquers the incumbent mySpace.

This is also a prefect example, and I’m sure bureaucratic, of a site not willing to change despite the signs spitting in their face. Everyone complained of mySpace’s cluttered layout. In hind-sight they should have offered a way to customize, along with filter, the way users presented their profiles. Instead they just sat back like the 300 pound gorilla and didn’t adapt to change. Now they are hustling to catch up….and it might be too late.

All Together Now

So what do all these have to do with each other? Well, obviously something according to Google Trends.

Using Keywords web development, usability,  web layout, user interface

Notice how all 3 keywords fluctuate at approximately the same rates. Some how, some way, they are all related.

To be honest, the best I can come up with is this.

• In order to be competitive in todays ever evolving web your development needs to be efficient and prompt, usabilty needs to be totally adaptable to the user, and the user experience must be smooth and hassle free with effects (AJAX) that are utilized only if they increase your visitors experience.

The perfect combination of all 3 of these should put your site ahead of your competitors and ahead on the search engines.