"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."  Lewis Carroll

The San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) continues to bring valuable seminars and training to the community.  Tuesday night the topic was "Landing Page Design: Beyond the Landing Page" with Larry Marine, owner of the new media consulting company "Intuitive Design."

The SDSIC splits its focus to provide both training to members on a variety of business skills related to technology, as well as providing a professional networking venue to help create business and individual career opportunities. 

With a very robust schedule of weekly meetings, the SDIC has an uncanny ability to attract high quality speakers and professional instructors.  The topics are broken down into several different Business Interest Groups (BIGs), with the objective to bring professionals together in an environment that will hopefully stimulate new relationships.  

The SDSIC is very similar to OCTANe (serving Orange County), representing a very positive community-supported effort to help develop business and people.

Larry Marine walked through the process of building great landing pages.  A landing page is designed to support a single marketing campaign or event topic, with several specific characteristics, including:

• Focus on a single event or marketing offer
• A call to action
• A means to capture visitor contact information
• Consistent look and feel with main web site
• Limited navigation outside of the landing page

Larry focused on developing landing pages which would serve a single purpose, an emphasis on expanding existing markets.  Key to this purpose is the process of creating a very strong user experience.  To accomplish this task you will need to have very good information on your expected or target demographic. 

One interesting point made during the presentation is the idea that we should focus on the role a person plays, not their title.  Roles can also be thought of as different hats an individual may wear depending on their current objectives.  

The role a person is engaged with at any time will determine their motivation for connecting to a landing page or other resource.  An effective landing page will engage that person, providing some value for the person in the form of a downloadable white paper or other desired information.

Other topics such as the user "sense of progress" through the landing page and sub-pages, sense of gaining value from their time on the site, collecting contact and lead information from the landing page visitor, and developing a relationship of trust with the visitor gave even the most seasoned web designers in attendance with some new ideas and reason to question their own approach to landing pages. 

Larry uses the above quote from Lewis Carroll as a recurring theme in his presentations and web site.  You need to know where you are going.  Else you are likely to spend a lot of time and resources getting nowhere.

Read more of Larry's thoughts and wisdom at his blog.   Larry has more than 20 years in user experience design, a degree in Cognitive Sciences (from UC San Diego), and 15 years experience working as a computer systems specialist.

John Savageau, Long Beach