Two Impressive Home/Landing Pages

Lately I have been doing quite a lot of research on how to build effective, convincing, and SEO friendly landing pages. That is, I've been trying to figure out how to best visually present the services offered at travel pals in a way that convinces people to sign up (dammit!) before I attempt to officially launch the site.

I might write a longer post collecting all of my thoughts about what I have learned thus far, but for now I wanted to take the opportunity to share two sites that, in my opinion, nailed it. Prosperworks (which I actually signed up for--it's great for tracking networking progress while trying to find a job) and RelateIQ seem to have struck that almost impossible balance of being aesthetically pleasing, informative, and compelling. Hats off to you all, and thanks for the inspiration.

Website Beta Up

I realized that I haven't yet mentioned the fact that my website, http://findtravelpals.com, has been up for the past couple of days.

Be warned, however, that the website is still in beta and is not necessarily a reflection of the end product.

Basically I've had the site up and running to iron out a couple of the last, stubborn remaining kinks before I officially launch. In the mean time though, feel free to check it out, sign up or subscribe to the mailing list if you're looking for future updates (or are just feeling generous), and offer any feedback you might have.

A Good Flat Style Tutorial (and a Minor Website Teaser)

I have found that designing a website is probably the most fun (and interesting) part of launching a new site. Because I have only decent 'shop skills, I decided to follow the recent "flat style" design trend.

As when I attempt to learn anything, I started looking into flat style design by searching YouTube tutorials. And as is always the case, I found countless extremely long, only mildly helpful "tutorials" out there. But I did find one excellent diamond in the rough that stands out as an excellent example of how to do tut vids.

 In just 30 seconds, this video clearly shows you how to emulate the iconic flat style icons that are cropping up all over the internet. Did the uploader go a bit fast? Maybe, but then he also took the time to write out instructions in case the viewer couldn't follow.

Why is this an excellent tutorial video? Because it's straight to the point. That is, there's no two-minute rambling speech about how the person is "sorry that he/she hasn't been uploading videos lately", "trying to post more vlogs soon", and "so thankful that he/she has so many followers"; there's no bumbling ten-minutes of dull speech, tangents, and "ums". No, this is just a short, no nonsense video that teaches you exactly how to do what you were looking to do. And for that, James Plank, I commend you.

Using the instructions from the above tutorial, I ended up making some of my first icons. I'll end this post with an example of what I've made so far. Hopefully it doubles well as a kind of teaser for what's to come on the website!