UX encompasses everything a user feels when interacting with your website, including the landing pages that convert first-time visitors into your digital acolytes.

Landing pages are critical in online marketing because they can generate leads, promote products, and generate awareness. Think of them as the formal introduction between your site and your user after being directed from search engines, social media, and email campaigns.

The user gets a good idea about your site’s utility through your landing page. A well-designed landing page strategically communicates on behalf of your brand while guiding the user through retention and sales funnels. They’ll remember an easy sign-up experience, and they’ll also remember an annoying and confusing one.

The content on your landing page is key to directing your user. But what good is clear content with a bad layout or distracting design? And what good is an awesome design with cold, boring messaging?

Consider these design elements when building your perfect landing page:

Have a Clear Goal In Mind

Simplicity is the name of the game with landing pages. Know what you want the user to do when they get to the page and make that your only focus.

To accomplish this goal, keep the page as distraction-free as possible. Avoid different calls to action that take the user away from the desired conversion funnel. And avoid outbound links that take the user away from the page entirely.

Having one option on the page narrows down their choices and makes the experience completely unambiguous. Less is more with your landing page.

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Write Headlines That Demand Attention

The headline is the first thing a user sees when they click on your landing page, and you can communicate so much in just a few simple words. You have only seconds to capture and retain your user’s attention. Keep the messaging of your headlines straightforward and engaging.

Fonts, typography, and color palettes are all essential parts of your branding. Together, they form the big picture of your verbal and visual identity in the user’s mind. Be sure to incorporate these elements into your headline to introduce the user to your brand and uphold your identity.

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Keep Content Short and Sweet

This might come as a surprise, but our online attention spans are short.

Big blocks of text turn users away from landing pages. The goal is to give them a quick idea of the page’s function and direct them to the first conversion funnel. Sum up your aim with your headline, brief description sentence, and a clear call to action.

If using extra text is unavoidable, then break it up into easily digestible sections. Divide sections into subheadings that highlight value propositions or create a bulleted list that simplifies a process. Just remember — scannable copy is king.

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Only Ask For What You Need To Know

The user does not want to answer a million questions to create a profile or buy something off your website. Keep your forms simple and ask only what you need to know for a quick, frictionless conversion process.

Users are generally more willing to give out their email than their phone number, so asking for an email address first is a great way to start the conversion process. You can also reduce the number of required forms to give the user more control over the contact information they share.

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Make Your CTAs Unignorable

So you’ve roped in your user with an interesting headline and cool layout. Now they need to know where to go next to accomplish their goal.

You need a clear call to action that shows the user how to get to the next conversion funnel. Keep CTAs as succinct as possible so the user knows exactly what will happen when they click that button.

Your CTA needs to be easily identifiable against the other elements in the interface. Using a contrasting color from the background is a great way to focus on the most important parts of the page.

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Keep CTAs close enough to the headlines and images — the things that draw the user’s eye right off the bat. If your landing page is long and text-heavy, try to place a couple of different CTAs throughout the page.

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Now Ramp Up The Visuals

Your brand's visual identity will guide the overall design of your landing page, but be sure the content and messaging do not get lost in the shuffle.

A minimalist design is a great way to call attention to the CTA but can come off as boring if not done right. Your color palette and images are great accents on a simple landing page. Your landing page should inspire trust and reliability, so make sure images are high-quality and on-brand.

The actual content needs to be the focal point of the page, even on a busy layout. Fonts in contrasting colors help the user separate the message from the rest of the design. Some light shading also helps words pop out against the background. Above all, your CTA still needs to be easily identifiable and optimally placed.

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The Ultimate Landing Page Checklist

Landing pages have a lot of power in digital marketing. Well-designed landing pages generate excitement for your brand while boosting your sales and conversion rates through the roof. And bad ones have real-world consequences that drive people away from your site, losing you money.

As always in UX, user testing will tell you all you need to know about how the page functions and what needs improving. You won't know for sure how effective the page is until you test it with your users.

Take your design through this checklist for a strong starting point:

1. Is the goal of the landing page clear?
2. Does the headline draw and keep attention?
3. Does the content accurately communicate the page's function?
4. Do the forms make the onboarding process too long or frustrating?
5. Can I identify the CTA?
6. Do I know what is going to happen when I click the CTA?
7. Does the design of the landing page accurately represent my brand?
8. Does the design distract from the overall purpose of the landing page?
9. Is there anything in the interface that would prevent users from completing their goals?
10. Will this conversion experience help me retain users?

If your design passes all these questions, it is ready for the real world.

Are you struggling with building your perfect landing page? CreateApe's UX designers know how to make landing pages engaging and conversion-focused. View our capability deck here.

UX has great power to either help or mislead the user.

At CreateApe, we often talk about how important it is to gain the user’s trust. Companies should want users to feel good about their websites by helping them seamlessly and safely accomplish their goals.

But when money enters the picture, some web designers prioritize numbers and sales over the user’s convenience. This leads to deceptive practices that manipulate users into bogus agreements that cost them their privacy — and often their money.

These practices are called dark UX patterns, and it’s when user experience turns into user exploitation.

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Avoid These 5 Common Dark Patterns

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Forced Continuity

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How many of us have signed up for free trials and then never canceled them? It can end up costing the user several hundred dollars a year without them ever noticing. Companies ask you for credit card information to protect their assets and ensure they don’t keep giving out free services.

The problem happens when the user doesn’t know when their trial is over and they get charged without a warning. Or when companies make it blatantly difficult to cancel.

Combat this by making it easier for the user to opt-out of the free trial before charging them. Send a notification that the trial period is ending, and don’t bury cancellation links in giant walls of text.

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Privacy Zuckering

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We know, we’re just as annoyed with the lack of transparency around data mining as you are. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to court over Facebook privacy breaches? Well, now he has a UX dark pattern named after him.

This term was coined by UX designer Harry Brignull in his online guide to dark patterns. He defines this as the practice of tricking the user into giving up more of their private information than they normally would with jargon-y language in Terms of Service agreements. They take advantage of our tendency to scan without reading the fine print to lead us into giving out sensitive information.

The good news is that many online platforms became much more transparent about collecting our data after this incident (mostly to avoid legal action, but that’s still worth something). There is now an expectation that the user is made aware when their data is collected.

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Trick Questions

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In UX, the words on your page are just as important as the visual elements. And some designers deliberately try to confuse their users to get them to agree to something they don’t want.

Trick questions are often layered, using clever wording or double negatives to create cognitive dissonance. Sometimes they make it impossible to opt-out of mailing lists by lumping everything in with Terms of Service agreements.

At the end of the day, clarity is key. The user’s consent matters — and tricking users creates an ethical dilemma that goes against the principles of UX. The user should always have agency and designers must create that sense of agency with clear, unambiguous messaging.

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Misdirection

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A distracting design could be completely harmless, or it could have an ulterior motive. Many dark patterns utilize some form of misdirection by guiding the user’s attention to a specific place to distract them from something else.

Think of a time you bought something expensive online and the website tried to add some unnecessary insurance. Did you think there was no way to get around adding insurance? Or did they hide the option to skip insurance somewhere else on the page?

Misdirection is easily avoidable in UX with color theory, minimalist designs, and grouping related options closely together in the interface. Always remember that your user should be able to complete their goals easily, without distraction.

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Hidden Costs/Fees

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Everyone knows there are taxes and shipping charges that make the checkout cost more than the advertised price. That’s not where the problem is.

The problem is when websites tack on unnecessary hidden fees at the last stage of check out. How expensive has a delivery or small cart fee made your online takeout order? These types of fees vary in cost, but they can start to add up after a while.

Let your users know about any additional charges at the first stage of check out. If they go through the entire process to see their order is way more expensive than initially anticipated right before they place it, they’ll leave feeling frustrated with the experience.

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So Why Is This Important?

While the results from dark patterns lead to short-term gratification, the user will eventually catch on and there will be no foundation of trust to build off of. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to companies finding new ways to digitally dupe their users.

At the end of the day, it’s best to bank on honesty and follow UX best practices.

Businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to resources to create a website. Between free templates and a huge range of hosting platforms, almost anyone can create a website for their company.

The DIY method seems like the easiest solution, but will it set you up for long-term success? Will your brand stand out against a jungle full of custom, user-approved digital products?

Call us biased, but UX/UI design is well worth the investment because of its ability to bring in users and keep them coming back for more. According to this article from medium.com, UX design has insanely high ROI rates (some as high as 301%)!

Users also agree about the power of UX because it benefits them as much as the business. In fact, 3 out of 5 users agree that a positive user experience is more influential than marketing or advertising.

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If you’re interested in seeing how UX design can help your business, but don’t have the resources to create a website yourself, don’t panic! That is where we come in.

Digital agencies like CreateApe have both the services and expertise you need to redesign your digital product or create an all-new website from scratch. Leave your project with us—and we’ll deliver something that your company and your users can be proud of!

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CreateApe's Resources to Create a Website

• Research
• UX/UI design
• Website development
• Branding
• Marketing
• Copywriting
• Video
• Digital Products
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Benefits of Hiring a UX Agency

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We’ve talked ad nauseum about the financial benefits of UX design and how it affects customer satisfaction, so let’s take a step back and look at how an agency improves the product itself.

Free website templates are great for building personal websites or portfolios, but professional companies need something more substantial.

Free website templates usually have restrictions that can negatively impact the business (and the user experience by extension).

The Drawbacks of Free Website Builders

• Page limits
• Limited storage
• Limited features
• No customer support outside contact forms
• No custom domain name
• Advertisements/company branding
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Your branding means more to your users than the free website builder’s logo. Competing brand identities on your page can confuse and distract the user. It also just looks less official.
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Benefits of a Professionally-Built Site

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UX/UI design is so much more than just the website. It covers everything from discovery to new products and features post-launch. It also tells you everything you need to know about your users and how to keep your brand moving forward in the competitive market.

Let’s say you’re a healthcare provider that needs a professional website for patients to book appointments. CreateApe can build as many pages as you need, design appointment portals and insurance features, create a chatbot for customer support, claim an original domain name, and conceptualize a unique brand identity from scratch.

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The result is not only a fully-functional website but a more valuable brand and products that set you apart from your competitors.

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How CreateApe Builds Sites

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CreateApe is a full-service agency, meaning all your resources to create a website are in one place! No matter what stage of development your product is at, we can step in and fill in any gaps you need to get it finished.

Let’s walk through the typical process we take to create a website from the ground up.

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Our UX Process

Jungle Guide: 

UX design is heavily reliant on research to understand your industry, your business, and (most importantly) your users. We start each project with a robust research phase so we can bounce ideas off each other and find solutions that work for the users.

If we’re redesigning an existing website, we’ll look at your Google Analytics to understand your website traffic and user behaviors. We also do a HotJar evaluation to see where users are most active or dropping off.

If we’re creating a website from scratch, we skip this phase and move straight to competitive research and user interviews. Research is important for both kinds of projects because the UX design should be built around your data and findings. 

Without this research, you have no idea who your users are, what they want, or what drives them away from a website. You also need to understand who you’re up against so you can make your product better. We’re here to help you navigate this process from beginning to end.

The Jungle Guide, CreateApe’s signature UX evaluation, help you ask all the right questions in the discovery phase and lay the groundwork for a perfect product! Read more about CreateApe’s Jungle Guide in our UX Strategy Blog! 

UX/UI Design:

Once we have research and strategy to guide us, we can start building your future site! We start with wireframes, which are like blueprints. We can determine how many pages we’ll need, where content lives, and site navigation.

By creating this primitive structure, we can focus more on creating logical user flows instead of being distracted by aesthetics. A nice hierarchy of information that will help the user quickly accomplish their goals is what we’re after.

That being said…looks are important! Who said you had to sacrifice style for substance and vice versa? Our UI designers take those wireframes and ramp everything up into a high-fidelity mock-up.

We'll take your branding elements and use them to create visuals. For example, where will logos be placed? How will we use your color palette to guide the user through the interface? What sort of icons will we use? Etc.

Website Development:

Once we finish with the designs, we turn everything over to our full-stack development team. Our front and back-end developers can handle everything from code creation to interaction design to deliver a fully customized digital product.

Whether or not you have a development team on staff, our team can guide you through the development process from beginning to end into whatever framework you choose. Much like our UX/UI process, every solution we create goes through vigorous user testing and QA.

Leave it to us to make sure everything on the user-facing side of your site works as intended. If you’re creating a project from scratch or need to bring someone on to improve the performance of your existing site, CreateApe is your all-in-one web development resource. To read more about hiring a website development team, check out our blog!

Launch:

Our job isn’t over once we launch your MVP. When you bring us on as your UX partners in crime, it’s just the beginning!

Once your product is in front of your users, we’ll help you perform regular website maintenance to ensure everything is search engine friendly and working like it’s supposed to. This means updating software, fixing broken links, optimizing load speeds, stress tests, updating certificates, plugins, and theme updates.

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You’ll also have our full creative team at your disposal depending on your needs. If you need to add a new page, redesign a contact form, create a new product video, or write a conversation-starting blog post, you can call on your friendly team of UX apes and we’ll swing into action!

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What can CreateApe Help Me With?

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At CreateApe, we’re so much more than just website design. We’re advocates for your users within your business goals. We’ll stop at nothing to find solutions that work for you and your users.

In the spirit of going above and beyond web design, our expertise extends further than UX/UI. Anything creative you can think of to take your site to the next level, we can do it. Our design team is staffed by wizards in their field that can take your ideas from concept to reality.

When you hire CreateApe for a project, you have all these resources to create a website at your disposal.

CreateApe's Services

• UX Research - Understanding your competitive market, your users, and their nuances.
• UX Design - Building end-to-end flows that help users and business owners accomplish their goals.
• UI Design - Designing visuals to boost the brand’s identity and strengthen the user experience.
• Website Development - Creating highly-customized code for your product across multiple devices.
• Branding - Conceptualizing a unique personality and visual identity to set you apart from your competitors.
• Marketing - Promoting your brand and digital products with personalized campaigns and collateral.
• Video - Telling your brand's story by scripting, animating, and editing video content.
• Copywriting - Communicating on your behalf by developing a unique voice and tone to guide your users.
• Digital Products - Whether you need a website, app, ebook, or landing page, our apes can make your vision a reality.
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So, How Do I Build My Perfect Site?

There’s an abundance of resources to create a website available to you, but will they really give you the results you’re looking for?

If you have an idea for a digital product or a clear business goal, a UX design agency (*cough* like CreateApe *cough*) can help you figure out those pivotal first steps to get off the ground. We’ll help you figure out exactly what you need to reach your goals and connect you with the resources to get you there.

So, whether you need a fully-customized product, strategy, or specialist to help create your website, drop us a line!

Still not sure about starting your project with CreateApe? Check out our UX/UI design case studies to hear our success stories.

We’re heading into the second quarter of 2022 with not one, not two, but FOUR awards from The Manifest. Talk about bringing home the bananas!

The Manifest doesn’t monkey around when it comes to small businesses. As an excellent hub for news and resources, we’re thrilled to be included in their list of “California’s Best Recommended B2B firms for 2022."

CreateApe ranked #13 in “Most Reviewed Web Development Companies,” “Most Reviewed Design Companies,” and “Most Reviewed Digital Agencies”—and #4 in “Most Reviewed User Experience Companies in Los Angeles.”

The rankings are based on the number of new reviews and recommendations left on Clutch.co over the last 12 months. So shout out to our awesome clients for helping us receive this recognition!

We’re always happy to be rewarded for our hard work as a team, but we’re even happier knowing we were great jungle guides for our partners over the last year. We’re more excited than ever to help businesses swing to new heights in 2022.

Want to see what CreateApe can do for you? Read about our services or drop us a line!

As we swing into quarter two of 2021, we’ve got some tree-mendous news from the information hut to share with all of you: DesignRush has named CreateApe the top digital agency of 2021! Rock on, team!

DesignRush is a B2B marketplace that connects brands with agencies. It was founded in 2017 and has grown into a global agency network with over 8,800 listed professional agencies from over 60 different countries and consulted by thousands of decision-makers looking to start a project.

CreateApe was ranked one of the top digital agencies for our user experience & user interface (UX/UI) design expertise and consistent ability to provide the highest quality of customer service possible.

We could not be more appreciative of being singled out for this award. We’re going bananas over it since it validates all of the awesome work we’ve designed and developed in quarter one for our clients. Our commitment to them and to our users is the foundation of who we are.

At CreateApe, we tackle every project, no matter the level of complexity, with a sense of purposeful passion because we value our clients’ success as our own. We develop modern, visually appealing products that aren’t just designed to look good but are also functional and intuitive to the user’s experience. However, we would be nothing without happy clients.

We’re always looking to act as a jungle guide to navigate you through the wild. If you need some help but don’t know where to start, drop us a line. We’ll do our best to clear out the brush and guide you down the path toward your digital and print goals.

CreateApe is now featured on Clutch.co and has already received two stellar reviews for outstanding service. Clutch is a Washington DC based research, ratings and reviews firm that covers thousands of business to business firms from over 500 different industries. Each company on Clutch is evaluated on multiple criteria such as; market presence, client base, and industry experience. Clutch’s platform allows firms to compare similar services and choose the one that best compliments their future business plans.

Additionally, CreateApe’s talented team of experts are not only capable of implementing the newest technologies on the market, but also excel at providing the highest customer service possible to all our clients. No matter the level of complexity of the project, CreateApe is eager to develop modern, visually appealing products that not only look good, but are functional and intuitive. In addition to UX and UI design, our team can also help with web development and over all digital services. For any business inquiries or questions, please contact us here.

A recent client of ours has given feedback on a project with us on Clutch.co and rated us a 5- star service. The project was to create a real estate management platform that was easy to use for all parties. The reviewer was incredibly impressed with our turnaround. They said,

“We can give them a skeleton model and they come back with an incredible representation of what we’re seeking.”

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Another reviewer of CreateApe on Clutch’s platform really appreciated our refreshing approach compared to other businesses they’ve worked with. They said,

“What was refreshing about CreateApe is that they took the time to understand the technology we’re using.”

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This reviewer goes on to talk about the results of the web design we created for them. They also said,

“It’s getting positive feedback on the look and feel, a major improvement from the previous site.”

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All this positive feedback on Clutch has already made us a leader on their Orange County UX Designers page. Furthermore, Clutch just announced that on September 5th, they’ll be releasing a press release of the top business service companies in California. Even with two reviews, we’ll be included in this press release because of our hard work and commitment to clients.

We look forward to collecting more Clutch reviews on our profile to rank even higher as a UX and Digital agency. Thank you to our clients for spending the time supporting us and leaving us feedback through Clutch’s platform!