What is a Website Landing Page?

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What is a Landing Page?

A website landing page is the entry page your visitors arrive at after they have clicked on a link when searching for your website, or your services or products. Your website can have multiple landing pages depending on the number of services and products. Each landing page can cater to a distinct audience and can be used to build serious engagement.

  • A website landing page is an essential process of the online sales process and is excellent at providing a customized sales pitch for your website visitors.
  • A website landing page is a giant step forward in the selling process, so calls-to-action must be powerful and as easy to follow as possible
  • A website landing page can be created to reinforce the reason your visitors landed on your website

The best way to do this is to determine where your visitors have come from and who they are and by matching the results with top-notch website copy, your chances of engaging your visitors go up, as should your conversion rate.

When you get visitors through your pay-per-click or email campaign, these people have a higher degree of interest, because they were already looking for your product or service. So it is best to make sure that your landing page is relevant to the initial offer they clicked on, and not redirecting them to your home page. This is often overlooked – a lot of advertisers send people to their home page based on an offer but once the visitor lands on that page, the offer is nowhere to be found so they simply click X and go somewhere else!

You should create targeted landing pages anytime you can control where people will be coming from, and your goal is a specific transaction such as sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc. This is particularly true if you are paying for the traffic, with banner ads, sponsored links, or pay-per-click.

Have you relied on website landing pages to drive traffic to your website? If yes, how was your experience?

What is Project Scope Creep?

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What is Project Scope Creep?

Project scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Typically, the scope increase consists of either new products or new features of already approved product designs, without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As the scope of a project grows, more tasks must be completed within the budget and schedule originally designed for a smaller set of tasks. Thus, scope creep can result in a project team overrunning its original budget and schedule.

If the budget and schedule are increased along with the scope, the change is usually considered an acceptable addition to the project, and the term “scope creep” is not used.

Project scope creep can be a result of:

  • A disingenuous customer with a determined value for free policy
  • Poor change control that results in re-work and changes without monitoring
  • Lack of proper initial identification of what is required to bring about the project objectives
  • Weak project manager or executive sponsor
  • Poor communication between parties
  • Finger pointing when things go wrong
  • Agile software development based on subjective quantifications.

Project scope creep is a risk in a lot of projects. Scope creep often results in cost overrun. A value for free strategy is difficult to counteract and remains a difficult challenge for even the most experienced project managers.

However, scope creep can be avoided by. Here are a few examples:

  • Properly managed and implemented change control mechanisms
  • Detailed specification and requirements definitions
  • Open and candid between the parties involved
  • Focused and tightly monitored project management

(Some of the information that appears in this post was obtained from Wikipedia)

Read This Before Finalizing a Content Management System (CMS)

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Arnima Selecting A Content Management System

Content Management System have become a major requirement when one is considering a website to represent a company on the internet. There are a number of content management systems available to cater to a particular situation. Such systems can be open source or proprietary, custom or third party.

Here are 6 important points to consider before you finalize a solution:

Workflow – Through workflow, you can define the process of how content will be approved before it goes live. So in a multiuser environment, it checks the validity of content being published.

Versioning – The selected content management system should support different versions of the same content and allows for rollback and comparison to previous versions. Every time users import data and modify content, a copy is created in the Database – the old version is not deleted, but stored together with the newer versions. Versioning provides a more powerful alternative to keeping backup files.

Scalability – As the site expands in future, will it be able to handle a bigger website, will it support features like Blog, Polls, User Management, Forum and other advanced modules if need be?

Ease of use – Can you manage your website without the help of developer? WYSIWYG Editor, Spell Checker, User-friendly Interface, Drag-n-Drop features to add modules & pages, help, Ajax etc are few of the features that need to be looked into.

Hosting compatibility – The selected CMS engine should be supported by a large number of website hosting companies so that you don’t end up paying hefty monthly charges to your hosting companies due to limited choice.

Support – Last but not least, professional support should there from the company supplying the content management system. There are 1000’s of content management systems out there both proprietary and open source. Should only consider the ones which are backed by established companies, have good support in case any help is needed. This is one of the major problems with using lot of open source solutions. There is no formal support structure in place and you end up with ad-hoc support through forums.