Landing Page Design - 1 Page

The requirements for this contest are to design the front-page of a landing page. We have all mis-typed a domain name in the past in our browser address bar, and have landed on a page full of advertisements. Well, how many of those times have you clicked an advertisement? If you are a Sitepoint member, the chances are quite low - because these landing pages were never convincing enough for the user to stick around.

Well the requirement here to create a landing page design that is very CLEAN and at the same time EFFECTIVE.

$1000 award to the winner, and $200 award to the runner-up.

Accepted File Formats:
Standard Web Formats (.jpg, .gif or .png); Vector Formats (.eps, .pdf or .ai); Layered Formats (.psd or .tiff)

The requirements for this contest are to design the front-page of a landing page. We have all mis-typed a domain name in the past in our browser address bar, and have landed on a page full of advertisements. Well, how many of those times have you clicked an advertisement? If you are a Sitepoint member, the chances are quite low - because these landing pages were never convincing enough for the user to stick around.

Well the requirement here to create a landing page design that is very CLEAN and at the same time EFFECTIVE.

What do I mean by CLEAN and EFFECTIVE? First off, the landing page design needs to fit all types of categories out there such as Gaming, Finance, Banking, Health, etc etc - therefore the layout color should probably not be dark. Instead it should be something that can fit any theme/category.

 

Here are a few examples of landing pages that are out there: (And I am not saying that these are good landing pages or that these landing pages are something I would want as well):
http://park.parkingpanel.com/gals4free.com

http://homeborrowing.com/

Basically, what we want is something where the user can upload his/her image and have it displayed on the landing page. The landing page would only have 1 larger image, there shouldn't be any smaller images of any kind.

Although, unlike many landing pages out there, ours will have a little twist. It should allow for article content somewhere in there, so that users can add their own articles or text. This should be optional, therefore the landing page should look good with or without it. But always try to design so that it looks good with it. We can always use default text if it is not possible to do without text.

There should be only 1 navigation menu. And that should be on the left side. Here is a navigation menu that I really like:

http://clusty.com/search?input-form…uery=games

That is very clean and effective, and I wouldn't mind if the designer did something similar. Although as a designer, you can do whatever you'd like. I'm sure there are even better navigation menus out there.

A few things to keep in mind. Navigation should never have more than 10 links. And keep in mind that navigation MAY have less than 10 links, therefore it cannot be fixed into the layout itself. I like the Clusty layout alot, they are very clean and effective. They are good example to follow. They also use the right colors which would fit any theme.

Once again, there may or may not be text around an image. I would like the designer to experiment with it and see what he/she can come up with. Maybe text around and image would make things look better. Depends on the layout, I guess.

PS

There is no logo since these are landing pages which will be served on hundreds of different domain names. If you want, you can make a generic logo that can fit all domain names. But, it is probably just best to use text that says something like "Video Games" or "VideoGames.com" on top so that we can change it based on the domain name. The text could be a different font not supported by a web browser - that would be fine. It is upto the designer on that.

 

$1000 award to the winner, and $200 award to the runner-up.

 

Best of luck to all designers!