Web Design '09 Conference Session Descriptions

Whether shoppers come to your site because you did a great job of optimizing it for natural language search or because you know how to entice consumers to click on sponsored links, the real challenge comes when they arrive and are ready to buy. Most shoppers these days bypass the home page. So while many retailers put a lot of effort into creating beautiful home pages, they could be missing out on sales by not paying equal attention to the pages that consumers land on when they come from a search engine. This session will address how to design sites for search engine spiders and humans at the same time; how to present a compelling, quickly digested value proposition; how to communicate safety and security from every product page; how to make sure that consumers can find alternatives in case your offering doesn't exactly match what they were looking for; and how to make sure the depth of landing pages match the specificity of a product search, i.e., making sure someone searching for "short sleeve sports shirts" doesn't end up on a sports shirt page (too broad) or a Polo page (too narrow). Our speakers this session will discuss how every landing page needs to fulfill the qualities of a home page, how search marketing raises the stakes and turns up the light on design basics and how to make sure that a bunch of killer landing pages add up to a coherent web site.