Landing Page Structure, Reasoned Backwards from the Three Conditions of Registration

A heading reads what customers say, and beneath it there is nothing said. A heading reads results, and beneath it there are no figures. Build a landing page along a list of structural elements and this state is frequently what gets built.

The frames are lined up correctly. The order was not got wrong either. The middle comes out empty because the list settles where things go and never settles what goes in them.

Structure is spoken of as the order of elements. Opening screen, empathy, benefits, results, testimonials, application. Arrange in that order, runs the account. The order can be settled. Being settled, structure looks complete the moment the arranging is done.

One thing ought to be settled before arranging. What the act at the end of that page asks of the other person. Registration asks one judgement of them: decide, about something not yet received, whether it is worth receiving. Structure is nothing other than the design that hands over the material for that judgement before the judgement is made.

The side that rearranging does not move is what gets handled. What registration actually demands. How many conditions that demand yields, and which. And what the arrangement called the flow of emotion conceals among those conditions. Those three are settled here.

The answer on length sits outside these pages. How many words a page should run gets no figure here. How many words are needed moves with what the reader already knows. The same text is too long for one reader and too thin for another. What can be handed over here is that criterion.

The manner in which the gap surfaces has a character too. A page whose conditions are unmet does not look as though anything is missing. The frames are there, the sentences are written, and to the eye it is finished. On the figures it surfaces only as registrations being few. Whether few because the material was short or because those readers had no need for it does not separate out from that figure.

Not separating, the next move goes to rearranging. Change the headings, swap the order, alter the colours. Each of these has something actually to do, so it stands up as work. While that work continues, the empty frames stay empty. Rearranging changes the order inside the frames, so it never touches the fact that a frame is empty. What follows is arranged as a route for filling them again from the side of the conditions.

The Account of Structure Is a List of Elements and an Order for Arranging Them

The structure presented consists of two things: a list of elements and the order in which they are arranged.

A landing page is a standalone page specialised to lead toward a single action. Placing no links to other pages, reading it from top to bottom, and connecting at the end to an application or registration is held to be the basic form.

The elements enumerated run roughly as follows. Opening screen, empathy with the trouble, benefits obtained, grounds supporting them, information about the provider, testimonials from users, content and price, frequently asked questions, and the part prompting action.

The principle of arrangement presented is the flow of emotion. Visitors scroll from the top and read on, so arrange each element in the order emotion moves. Noticing, empathy, expectation, conviction, reassurance, decision. Map them to that order, runs the account.

A production sequence is presented too. Settle purpose and audience, draft the structure, write the copy, design it, publish and measure. Proceed in that order. As means, the use of production tools is offered. Templates serve as a reference for structure, and a form can be made without specialist knowledge. It is presented as an option for those wanting to build it themselves rather than commission it.

And the point that structure governs the outcome recurs. The same content produces different results depending on arrangement, runs the account.

As practice, every part of this is written correctly. It is a fact that narrowing to a single action simplifies the judgement, and the enumeration of elements is comprehensive. The guideline of arranging in the order emotion moves does function in actual settings.

The whole enumeration presupposes one view. Structure is treated as a permutation of elements. There is a list of elements, and the arranging of them is optimised. It is organised as a problem of placement.

There is no error in treating it as a permutation. Elements do get arranged, and the order does change how things land. The arranging is necessary. The moment it closes as a permutation, the content of each element gets handled as already settled.

Benefits are handled as writable, grounds as existing. In most cases they are not settled. Arranged unsettled, what results is a state in which only the element headings are lined up. The state of frames correctly arranged and middles empty comes out of this order.

The premise has worked its way into the production sequence too. The guidance runs “draft the structure, write the copy”. Fix the structural draft first and the copywriting becomes the filling of frames. When a frame will not fill, the work does not stop there; words sufficient to fill it go in. The sequence itself is shaped to permit empty frames.

Before Arranging Structure, Look at What Registration Demands

What the other person judges at registration is not the value of what is handed over but whether to accept contact.

Registration is, in outward form, typing characters into a field and pressing a send button. As an action it is light. It costs nothing either.

Yet the action is not light. What makes it not light is what gets handed over. What the registering side hands over is a contact. To hand over a contact is to accept contact from this side. And how many times that contact will come, with what content, and until when, they do not know beforehand.

So what they are answering is not “do I want this information”. It is “may I accept continued contact from this party”.

The two demand different material. The former is answered if the content handed over is clear. The latter requires clarity about what happens after it is handed over.

Where discussion of structure concentrates on the arrangement of elements, what gets handled is almost entirely the former. Benefits, grounds and testimonials all show the value of what is handed over. About what follows the handing over, not a few pages say nothing.

There is a view that handing over a contact carries no such weight, that unsubscribing settles it. Whether unsubscribing works is not knowable beforehand. Few pages state how to unsubscribe, and where stated, whether it works cannot be verified until it is actually done.

And the judgement is made beforehand. That something can be undone afterwards does not lighten a judgement made before. It lightens it only where the undoing is known beforehand.

Writing what follows the handing over constrains what can be written. Write “once a week, content of this kind” and you are bound to that frequency and that content. The wish not to be bound produces the choice not to write. And a page with nothing written is, for the other person, a page on which no judgement can be made.

The evaluation of elements shifts too. Count separately the elements showing the value of what is handed over and the elements showing what follows, and not a few pages have the latter at zero. As a count of elements the page is amply supplied, yet it answers only one of the two questions. Looking at the list of frames, this skew never surfaces. The list carries no frame called what follows to begin with.

The direction of the skew has a reason as well. The value of what is handed over is the side you are free to write. What happens after it is handed over is the side that binds you the moment you write it. Where one side costs nothing to write and the other creates a constraint, what gets written leans toward the former. That elements are complete while only one side fills is not a matter of will but the upshot of that asymmetry.

The Three Conditions Under Which Registration Holds

The material needed for the judgement divides into three.

The first condition is that what is handed over is concretely clear. “Useful information” is not clear. Clear means being able to imagine the state of having received it. How many pages of what, arriving in what format, taking how long to read. Written, these let the reader imagine themselves afterwards.

Where it cannot be written concretely, in most cases it has not been made yet. What has not been made cannot be described concretely, so abstract wording gets chosen. It looks like a problem of expression and is a problem of substance.

The second condition is that what happens after handing over is clear. Frequency of contact, kinds of content, the span it continues. With those three shown, the other person can judge whether to accept. Unshown, they cannot judge, so only those who already trust you will hand anything over.

What tells here is not a declaration of honesty. It is whether the material needed for judgement is complete. Writing “please rest assured” adds no material; writing “once a week, on subjects of this kind” adds material.

The third condition is that reversibility is clear beforehand. That unsubscribing is possible and that it is known beforehand to be possible are different. Only the latter lightens the judgement made before.

None of the three is persuasion. They are the supply of material for a judgement. Designing structure is nothing other than placing those three somewhere ahead of the point the judgement is made.

The three, once met, do not thereby produce registration. Material complete, being judged unnecessary happens as a matter of course. What the three guarantee is only that the judgement is made on material. Without material, the judgement is made on anxiety or on expectation. Neither has anything to do with your content.

Complete the material and registrations do not necessarily rise. They can fall. What falls away are people who would have registered without material. They had not made the judgement to accept contact afterwards, so they leave later.

On the third condition, making the unsubscribe notice prominent reads as teaching people the exit. A place whose exit is not visible is harder to enter. The same structure operates in buildings. The judgement to enter is made together with the prospect of getting out.

And a person let in with the exit hidden lowers their estimate of you at the point they find they cannot get out. A person who did not enter with the exit stated lowers nothing. What concealment gains is the count of registrations; what it loses is the quality of the relation you can contact afterwards.

What They Weigh Is Benefit Against an Unseen Risk

This judgement has been handled empirically as a judgement about disclosing information.

The information systems researchers Tamara Dinev and Paul Hart showed in 2006 that the decision to provide personal information over the internet is made by weighing expected benefit against perceived risk (Dinev & Hart, 2006, Information Systems Research, 17(1), 61–80).

What settles the willingness to disclose is not the size of the benefit alone. How large the risk is estimated to be tells with equal weight. And among the factors lowering that estimate, how far the other party’s controls are felt to hold is raised.

The question this study answers sits narrower than the question here. What it handles is the provision of personal information in commercial transactions, not the structure of a landing page. What holds is the shape of the judgement.

Set into the setting of registration, it runs as follows. However high the benefits are stacked, they load only one pan of the scale. The other pan — the uncertainty of not knowing what follows the handing over — remains as it was.

And that side is not visible from here. The one who knows what will come after the handing over is only this side. The other person does not. Not knowing, the attitudes available to them are two: assume an average, or hand over nothing.

Assume an average and what happens. “Register and, most likely, sales messages will come repeatedly” becomes the default. That assumption holds in not a few cases, so it is reasonable from their side.

Here is the awkward part. Operators who do not send repeated sales messages are judged inside that default too. Absent material that overturns the default, they are not distinguished. The more honestly a thing is designed, the fewer the exaggerated promises, and the worse it looks beforehand.

That disadvantage is not solved by abandoning honesty. Abandon it and you merely join the side reinforcing the default. It is solved only by putting out material that can be verified beforehand.

What counts as material verifiable beforehand. Stating frequency and content is one. Once written, it can be checked against what arrives. That it can be checked means a lie would be exposed, and being exposable is what makes it work as material beforehand.

There is the objection that stating something is no guarantee it is kept, that the other person has no way to verify. There is a way: receive it once. A claim that cannot be verified can be written by anybody, so its being written carries no information. A claim that can be verified costs something if it proves false, so its being written carries information.

What the Arrangement Called “the Flow of Emotion” Conceals

The guideline “the flow of emotion” carries no object, and implemented with that blank left open, a default fills it.

An arrangement mindful of emotional rise and fall does work in some settings. Being shown a price before knowing what the subject is leaves nothing to judge on, so an order is genuinely required.

The guideline does not say whose emotion is moved in which direction, however. That sits blank while only “flow” is spoken of.

Implemented with the blank, a default fills it. The default is “make anxiety, then relieve it”. Have them feel that things cannot go on this way, then present the solution. Emotion moves a great deal, so the order works.

Working and being worth adopting are different. Making anxiety does not increase the material for their judgement. It alters how the judgement is made.

Increasing material and altering how judgement is made are indistinguishable from outside. Both produce the same observation, that emotion moved. And both produce the same outcome, registration.

What distinguishes them comes later. A person who judged on material stays, provided what arrives matches the material. A person who judged on anxiety leaves once the anxiety thins. The moment of leaving is offset, so the figures just after registration cannot tell them apart.

So judge structure on registrations alone and the anxiety-making design tends to win. The winning design can carry many people who will leave later, but that leaving is recorded as a different metric.

The order worth adopting is not emotion but judgement. The subject is clear. Its bearing on me is clear. What is handed over is clear. What follows is clear. Reversibility is clear. The arrangement in which material accumulates in that order is structure.

It is not that a structure ignoring emotion is good. Readers read with emotion, and an arid enumeration goes unread. The difference in handling runs thus. Emotion works on the side that makes visible what is already inside them. The side that manufactures it is not the presentation of material but intervention in the judgement.

This design loses on short-run figures. A structure that makes no anxiety tends to draw fewer registrations than one that does. The gap narrows only when leaving is counted in. Take a short observation window and this design tends to look like the loser.

The look comes out the same way in comparative tests. A method that places two structures side by side and compares registrations measures the difference only inside the compared window. Leaving falls outside the window, so it is processed without ever becoming an object of measurement. What the winning side contains is not written in the result of the comparison.

Length Is the Quantity of Information Left to Fill

Length is not a target but the result of the information needed to satisfy the three conditions.

The argument “longer is better” against “shorter is better” has no answer. What settles length is the quantity of information needed for the three conditions. What the reader already knows need not be written; what they do not know must be. The same content requires different lengths for different readers.

Concretely: a reader who has already read your writing needs no long account of what happens after handing over. They have experienced it. A first-time visitor needs that account entire.

This consequence changes how length is adjusted. Not “cut because too long” but “cut because this reader does not need it”. The criterion for cutting becomes the reader’s range of prior knowledge rather than volume. The same holds when extending. Not “add because too short” but “add because this condition is not yet met”.

A long page is not read to the end. Unread means written in vain, it can also be said. Not everybody needs to reach the end. Those who can judge partway do so there. What lies beyond exists for those who cannot. That someone with no need acts partway through is not a failure of the design.

Treat length as the result of information and the cutting needs a criterion. Without one, information that ought not be cut gets cut for being long. The criterion is the three conditions. A paragraph contributing to none of the three can go. One that contributes cannot be cut on grounds of length.

Cut thoroughly by this criterion and the page can grow considerably shorter. Elements contributing to none of the three — the readerly introduction, the survey of the industry, the provider’s history — in fact occupy considerable area.

Growing shorter is not itself the problem. The problem is that a shortened page can look like corner-cutting. Settings in which length reads as a measure of effort do exist.

What can be taken here is the option of moving the cut content to another page. There is no reason it has to sit on the same one. Gather the material required for judgement on a single sheet and place the background elsewhere. Divided, both get read.

The line for dividing is drawn by whether it is used in judging. Keep on the sheet what is required to decide whether to register, and move out what is worth reading after deciding. The provider’s history is, in most cases, the latter. For a reader before deciding, a long history and what happens after handing over are separate questions.

Writing What Follows Registration Is the Design of What Precedes It

Where the second condition cannot be met, the cause sits outside the page.

What to send after the handing over is not yet settled. Unsettled, it cannot be written. Unable to write, one writes “we will deliver useful information”. This is not a choice of expression but the appearance of something unsettled.

Put the other way, once the following stage is settled, this condition is met automatically. If what goes out in which message is settled, it can simply be written down.

Here sits a reversal of order. Building a landing page is ordinarily understood as building the entrance for acquisition. Yet to satisfy that page’s central condition, what lies beyond the entrance has to be settled first.

Which is to say the design of the following stage is the premise of the design of the entrance. Build the page before what gets sent is settled and it tends to land on abstract wording.

This order changes the sequence of work too. Settle the content of several messages first, then write the page prompting registration. Proceed in the reverse order and work rewriting the page tends to follow.

Not all of the following stage needs settling. If the first few messages are settled, the condition can be met. “First this arrives, and after it subjects of this kind continue” is enough to write. Even without the whole picture fixed, writing the fixed range accurately makes material for a judgement.

What is written becomes hard to change later. Write “once a week” and that frequency is a promise. Being unable to change is a constraint and a part of the design at once. Placing the constraint first is what settles the design of the following stage. Begin without writing a promise and frequency and content stay unfixed through what follows, and that unfixedness carries across to the other side as well.

There is a concern that if publication waits on the following stage being settled, starting gets deferred indefinitely. Narrow the range to be settled and you can start. Settle only the first message and write that far. “First this arrives. Beyond it, subjects of this kind get handled” suffices.

Deferral arises where the whole is what one tries to settle. The whole does not settle except while sending. Stalling over settling what will not settle, and putting out only what is settled, proceed differently.

How to build it concretely is handled in writing an email sequence. The design of what is handed over lies upstream, in designing a free gift.

The Order of Reading Cannot Be Specified from Here

Text read on a screen is not traversed from the top down.

The information scientist Ziming Liu surveyed a decade of change in electronic reading in 2005 and reported that reading on screen leans toward browsing and scanning (Liu, 2005, Journal of Documentation, 61(6), 700–712). Spotting particular words, passing through once, reading non-linearly. Deep reading demanding sustained attention had meanwhile declined, runs the observation.

The object of the survey does not coincide with the object here. What it handles is electronic reading in general, not the structure of a page prompting registration. What holds is that readers settle the order themselves.

Landing pages are designed on the premise of being read top to bottom on a single track. That premise does not hold completely. Some look at the price first; some look at the provider’s information first. Where they read from is settled by what they want to know, independently of your arrangement.

Two things follow from this observation.

First, each section must make sense read on its own. Write in a way that presupposes the preceding section and those who skipped it are lost.

Second, where any of the three conditions is written in only one section, a reader who skips it has that condition unmet. Important conditions end up placed in several locations in altered form.

This differs from repetition. Rather than placing the same sentence twice, “what happens after handing over” gets written at the summary and again just before the application, each at its own grain.

There is a concern that writing the same thing repeatedly grows tiresome. Repeated at the same grain it does. Change the grain and the second instance works as confirmation. Higher up, write the summary “once a week, on subjects of this kind”; just before the application, write only the immediate next step, “register and this arrives first”. The two answer different questions. The former answers “may I accept”, the latter “what happens now”.

Place conditions in several locations and the page grows longer. Length is settled by the quantity of information missing, but here the same information sits at several grains, so the volume does rise. The test is whether each account answers a different question. Answering the same question twice, one of them can go.

Drop the single-track premise and the section headings grow heavier. For a reader scanning, headings are a table of contents, the material from which content is inferred. Make frame names such as “features” or “pricing” into headings and there is nothing to infer from. Rather than the name of the frame, make the question that section answers into the heading. Then a reader following only headings is told where among the three conditions each thing is written. The moment the single track is abandoned, headings turn from ornament into function.

Can You Point to Where Each of the Three Conditions Is Written

Whether they are met can be read through three confirmations.

The first confirmation is reading the whole page and seeing whether, for each of the three conditions, you can point to the place that answers it. The place where what is handed over is concretely clear. The place where what follows is clear. The place where reversibility is clear. Any condition you cannot point to is a blank.

This can be run alone. The point is to look at whether the conditions are met, not whether the element frames are complete. The state of frames complete and conditions blank does arise.

The second confirmation is checking what a registrant first receives against the prior description. Did what arrive match what was written. Where it diverges, what gets corrected is either the description or the thing delivered. Which is settled by which is closer to the actual state.

The third confirmation is looking at the proportion remaining a set period after registration. Not just after registering, but later. Where many judged on material, this proportion runs high. Where many judged on anxiety, it runs low. What registration counts alone cannot distinguish separates here.

None of the three looks at the order of elements. What structure must satisfy is conditions, not a permutation.

Two of the three can be used only where operation has already begun. At the stage of building, only the first is available. The first alone settles many cases. A page with even one condition you cannot point to is, at that moment, short of material.

On the third confirmation, the question arises of how long a period to take. The rule for the period is settled by your own cycle of contact. Sending once a week, it is the point at which several cycles have passed. Measured over a period with no contact at all, the quality of the judgement does not surface.

No figure is placed on the question of length. The number of sections and the placement of the registration field fall away for the same reason. For an answer to hold as a figure, what the reader already knows would have to be constant. That quantity differs by reader, and differs for the same reader on a second visit. A fixed figure does not move once conditions have moved. Leave something immobile standing as the criterion for something mobile and the judgement bends to fit the figure.

Rearranging does not move this state. The frames were not empty; the questions answering to them had not been raised. That registration is the judgement may I accept contact. That the judgement rests on three conditions. That length is the shortfall in those conditions. Read again holding the three questions, and the empty frames show not as blanks but as unanswered.

So on the place you presently cannot write, the question narrows to one. Is it that the words will not come, or that what follows the handing over is not yet settled. The former is solved by rewriting; the latter puts work outside the page first.

What to convey on the opening screen is handled in designing the first screen, and the technique of manufacturing deadlines together with its cost in product launches. Once work outside the page comes first, what settles next is the order of starting. The order side — where to begin — is held by systemising a solo business.