Services / Landing pages
A landing page has one job, and every element that does not serve it is a leak.
The page is not a smaller website. It is the second half of an advertisement, and it either continues the specific thought the ad started or it fails, regardless of how well it is designed.
The canon
The principles this rests on, named.
Each with who established it, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on our word.
Attention ratio: the number of things a visitor can do should be one.
Oli Gardner, Unbounce
A page with a nav bar, a footer menu and three CTAs has an attention ratio of about 20:1. A landing page should be 1:1. Removing the nav is not a style choice.
Message match: the page must repeat the ad's exact promise, in the ad's exact words.
Long-standing direct-response practice; formalised in the scent-trail literature
The visitor is checking whether they are in the right place. Different wording reads as a different offer, and they leave before evaluating anything.
Information scent: people forage, following cues that suggest reward.
Pirolli & Card, Information Foraging Theory (Xerox PARC, 1999)
It explains bounce better than any aesthetic theory. Weak scent means the visitor cannot tell the page contains what they came for, so they return to the results page.
Isolation effect: the item that differs is the item that is remembered.
Hedwig von Restorff (1933)
The reason exactly one element on the page should carry the accent colour. Two primary buttons is the same as none.
Loss aversion: a loss is felt roughly twice as strongly as an equivalent gain.
Kahneman & Tversky, Prospect Theory (1979)
It changes what the copy should say. 'Stop losing 40% of your carts' does more work than 'improve conversion by 40%', for the same claim.
The Doherty Threshold: interaction under 400ms keeps attention engaged.
Walter Doherty, IBM (1982)
It is the reason page weight is a conversion issue and not an engineering vanity metric.
Method
What actually happens, in order.
We read the creative and the keyword first. The page is written to continue that specific sentence for that specific audience.
One. Written at the top of the brief. Every subsequent decision is judged against whether it serves that action.
No nav, no footer menu, no cross-links, no social icons. Every exit that is not the conversion is closed.
The page is ordered by the order the objections arrive in, which is rarely the order the business wants to talk about itself.
Not in a testimonial block at the bottom. Directly adjacent to the sentence it substantiates, because that is where the doubt occurs.
The page ships under a stated byte budget, enforced at build. A fast page on a mid-range Android on 4G is the actual requirement.
What goes wrong
The failure modes nobody advertises.
Full nav, three offers, an about section. It converts worse than a plain page because every link is a way out.
Repeatedly measured as near-zero engagement past the first slide, and they push the real content below the fold while shifting layout.
The visitor decided at the third scroll. Testimonials placed after the decision point are decoration.
A countdown that resets on reload is detectable in about two seconds and costs the credibility of every true claim on the page.
Each additional field costs completion. Ask only for what is needed to have the next conversation.
What we refuse
A studio is defined as much by this list.
- We do not build countdown timers that reset.
- We do not put a full navigation on a paid landing page.
- We do not write a claim we cannot source.
- We do not ship a page that fails its weight budget on a mid-range phone.
Measured, not felt
How anyone can tell whether it worked.
Attention ratio of 1:1.
Message match verified word for word against the live ad.
Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5s on a throttled 4G profile.
Form completion rate, per field, so a costly field is visible rather than assumed.