i wIlL deStroY goTham!
You know those ransom notes the bad guys always send in the movies?
The ones that are frankensteined together from 10 different magazines. Letters all different sizes and fonts. Colors change constantly.
How easy are those to read?
Yeah, exactly.
I’ll wager that if the message was something less critical than “i’M g0inG to bLOW uP all of goTham,” well, they probably wouldn’t get read at all.
There’s a trend I’ve noticed for a while in sales pages.
Instead of the “old fashioned,” “boring,” “ugly” sales pages that were just looooong streams of text with a sprinkling of headers…
These new-style pages look all fancy. Every half screen, there’s some new piece of eye candy.
You read a couple of paragraphs, and then there’s a big bold block of color that slashes across the page with a quote or stat in HUGE letters.
Then you read another couple of paragraphs, and there’s another block with a 3-column list of the product’s features and benefits.
The thinking is that people have short attention spans these days, so you gotta mix it up, and besides, those old pages were just sooooo ugly.
There’s just one problem…
These pages can easily KILL sales.
That’s because, unlike a ransom note, nobody really WANTS to read your sales page.
They’re looking for every excuse to bail and go do something more fun, like watching cat videos on Youtube.
And every time you change fonts or font sizes…
Every time you throw a random block of color on the page…
Every time you stick a chart in the reader’s path…
You’re throwing a speedbump in their way.
You’re making the reader hesitate, and every time that happens, you risk losing him.
Good copywriters know this. And they go to great lengths to remove the sticking points and roadblocks in their copy.
The reader’s eye should glide smoothly from the headline to the close, like a “greased slide” (as the famous Joe Sugarman puts it).
So hiring a pro copywriter to write your sales page only to destroy this carefully crafted effect so the sales page “looks better,” well…
That’s crazier than any of the Joker’s mad schemes.
Here’s a good rule to keep in mind:
Good design can’t fix bad copy, but BAD design can destroy good copy in a heartbeat.
