Presenting your ICO: landing page.
ICO, essentially, is a crowdfunding effort, thus it should cater for the crowd. Lading page is the first stop any interested parties will find themselves on, this is the online face of your project and, in most cases, your only opportunity to increase conversions. In this article, I will explore some of the principles of building a good lading page for an ICO.
Landing page — why it is important.
Having a good lading page is a first step towards getting a potential investor interested in your project. Good landing page solves a number of essential tasks:
· Presenting the main idea of your project
· Displaying your ICO goals an dstatistics
· Sharing information about your team and values
· Demonstrating your credibility and (ability to hire) design expertise
· Leading user through conversions towards a desired action (investment)
· Assuring legal responsibilities
You, as a team, of course, are interested in receiving investments, and all these tools will ultimately help with this goal.
It is important to note that ICOs rarely require a website more complicated than a short-ish landing page, containing basic information and links to documents and investment platform (personal cabinet). This is because the project being funded is in a prototype stage at best, only existing in a form big enough to demonstrate the ides. Many ICOs do not even have a prototype, rising funds to build one on pure ideas.
First steps towards a good landing page.
First thing a user sees on a landing page will have the biggest impact on how the feel about the content presented. Worst case scenario? They see a 10 second long loading bar in their mobile browser just to get ‘server unavailable’. Slow or unreliable service can literally annihilate your conversions — statistically, long loading times are the biggest mood killer for most users.
Making your landing page load faster and look more reliable is not hard if you are following some simple rules:
1. Pick a reliable web hosting. I suggest one of the DDOS-protected virtual servers you can rent on the internet from reputable providers.
2. Adjust the hosting to your needs. Make sure it is protected and has enough juice for your website sustainability — this should be based on the number of simultaneous visitors you are planning to have.
3. Get that SSL certificate for HTTPS to show you are credible. Your chosen hosting provider may be able to help with that.
4. Register a good domain name. Ideally, it should be your ICO name. British India domain .io is really popular with ICOs and blockchain projects.
5. Set up all the basic SEO for the website to make it more credible for the search engines — headers, meta and Open Graph are essential.
6. Keep the design simple — too many complicated elements may cause serious loading stress.
7. Have/hire a good development team that will make sure both backend and frontend are optimized and show good loading speed.
8. Make sure your developers use good tools — there are many frameworks out there, some more reliable than other. Consult with your team on what to use best, but try to avoid using site builders not to look cheap.
9. Design and code a separate, more optimized mobile/tablet version of your landing page to make it more pleasurable for those browsing from their phones (that is over 50% of all users).
Having these points covered, you should have no technical problems with the landing page, and you will increase your credibility in the eyes on investors as they will find it easy to access your web facilities.
Design is a marketing tool.
To be honest, in my opinion many ICO landing pages have either straight-out bad design, or it is very blockchain-specific. Landing page is the face of your business, a full screen space you can use to advance your goals. Don’t waste it. It does not mean that the first screen of your landing page should be overloaded with content, quite the contrary — place single most important thing first. Referring to the previous article about white papers, It can be your message, or an image of the world after you’ve done your thing, it can even be an emotion you want your prospects to feel when entering your website.
There is a number of marketing moves to stress a particular thing, and most digital designers will be able to do this for you if you can explain what it is. Do not forget to get all your content branded with your startup name, logo and colors where applicable — consistency is important for wholesome perception of your business. If you don’t have a logo and branding elements, you should order them as well.
Personal suggestion from me — try not to have too many blockchain-related elements in design. Chain links, boxes, code strings and Microsoft-influenced color palette can only help your project look less authentic. Find your own unique style that reflects your project goals best.
On user experience.
Once the website is loaded and you’ve made your core point through a combination of marketing message and design (possibly, animated), comes the phase where user explores your website. The more engaging your initial message was, the bigger percent of the users that stray upon your landing page will be interested in what is going on here. From here on, website usability is the most important parameter to make user absorb all the important messages and information.
This quality is often tangled with an ambiguous term User Experience, or UX. For the purpose of this article, UX is the combination of ease of use for the user and marketing value you can extract from every action. Normally, landing pages do not need excessive navigation, consisting of several screens that user can scroll through. Depending on the complexity of design thought, there can also be animations, interactive elements and embedded content. It is important to keep browsing experience simple — do not overload screens with content, highlight key messages, hide huge texts behind ‘read more’ expandables, and make sure the site looks and feels as natural as possible.
The easier time user will have navigating your landing page, the more reliably they will follow through to your next conversion point — be it reading your white paper, downloading your prototype or registering and buying your tokens in the personal cabinet. Remember that simplicity is the norm now. The fewer words there are in a sentence, the more people will read it. The fewer clicks user needs to make an action — the more will do it.
ICO specifics.
For ICO, landing page provides a good opportunity to graphically present the terms of your token sale: one-screen interactive roadmap with timeframes for sale stages, goals, benefits, as well as project advancement schedule can say more than a wall of text in the white paper. Landing page is a good place to post your stats, emphasize technologies and showcase your team. I cannot stress enough the importance of consistency when it comes to team representation — if your team cannot make similar photos, at least add a matching filter.
At this stage, do not forget to include all legally required elements a website should have — place disclaimers, trademarks and liability documents somewhere in the footer, make sure users receive cookie warning they should agree with, etc. Developers, weather in-house or outsourced, should generally know what is required, but it would not hurt to double-check with specialized lawyers.
Tips to getting most kick out of the landing page
Generally, you will need external marketing efforts to make traffic for your landing page. The vast topic of ICO marketing will be covered in a separate article of this cycle. However, after the users have ‘landed’ on your website, and were engaged in your project by the content, they should have a clear way to proceeded. Common practice here is to have a Call to Action button. It may be in the bottom, or somewhere in the corner of the screen, and it should be the single action you desire the most. For an early stages before ICO it can be ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’, or ‘Read White Paper’. Later on, it should be ‘Buy Tokens (now, while discount is still 30%!)’, and in the conclusion of ICO it can be either ‘See Statistics’ or ‘Refund’, depending on your success.
ICO landing page is a specific tool, built for a very precise goal. Although it can become a full startup website after a successful ICO, for the fundraising stage of your project it should be centered around this goal — gathering funds. Design, UX, marketing messages, CtA, presentation of terms and content, should all make little pushes for the user to feel the desire to support your project. This is a perfectly achievable goal, that, however, requires a good team of web-minded specialists that will be able to combine all the puzzle pieces into an elaborate marketing solution. You can always hire external assistance when in doubt, including our company: https://loftchain.io
Read more in my article cycle about technical specifics of ICOs:
Overview of ICO technical challenges
What should be in the smart contract
