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5 tips to designing your sales page


I just wrapped up designing for my worst client. Endless revisions, late nights and weekends, and she just couldn’t settle on a design. Back and forth, back and forth.

Have you been there?

Honesty check? That client was me.

If you’ve ever designed for yourself, you know that you are your worst client. It must take me 10 times longer to design for myself than my clients! I met this reality when designing my sales page for the Share-worthy Design course. Through this process, I learned a few key methods that kept me productive and out of the endless revision zone.

Are you ready to roll with your new launch? But just even the thought of pulling everything together brings you stress-sweat?

Been there! (ahem…this entire last month!)

Online courses and product launches are all the rage these days, and for a good reason! You’ve built a quality brand, and people are craving more.

Got your pen and beautiful little notebook ready? I’m going to walk you through a few tips on designing your sales page. Whether for your upcoming course, product or service, your sales page serves as your #1 marketing piece. Let’s make sure you do it justice!


Ready to roll with your new launch? But just even the thought of pulling everything together brings you stress-sweat? Here’s a few tips on designing your sales page, so you can rest easy.

Write first, design later

Odd #1 tip coming from a designer, huh? Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years (especially during architecture school), it’s that form follows function. When designing a house, for instance, you first need to establish the function of the floorplan. Once that’s all set, then you can apply the “form,” ie: put on your Fixer Upper hat and Joanna Gaines it up.

The same goes for your sales page. Establish the copywriting first, before you jump into designing. This means reach out to your favorite copywriter friend, or take to Google Docs yourself, and write your entire copy.

Conversions on your site typically come from three places: 1) a solid product/course/service, 2) writing that tells a story and is built for conversions and 3) visuals that support what you’re selling.

Design in sections

For the recent Share-worthy Design course sales page, I uncovered a design method that worked well for me — designing in sections. If you’ve ever DIYed your own sales page, you know that there are typically pages of content to include. It can be overwhelming to say the least!

Rather than designing one page for my sales page, I designed in sprints. I broke up the content logically — intro, pricing, lessons, etc. — and took it one chunk at a time. Squarespace makes this easy through using the index pages, which is included on a few of their templates. Indexes basically group together multiple pages into one.

Even if you aren’t using one of these Squarespace templates, you can still break up the design into manageable sections.

Utilize placeholder images

As a designer, developing the final supporting images can be a roadblock for me. Rather than making progress in the sales page layout, I get hung up on crafting beautiful images to include with each section. Am I alone in this?!

When designing my own sales page, as well as those for my clients, I often begin the wireframe process through using placeholder images. Squarespace allows for this easily when you place an image block, and don’t link to an image. It will place a gray box as a placeholder until you upload your artwork.

So when you’re in the beginning stages of designing your sales page, upload placeholder images until the layout is finalized. This helps you avoid wasting time on unnecessary images that you won’t even include with the final structure.

Batch images

Once you’re all set with the structure of your sales page, it’s time to bust out your Adobe moves and design the supporting marketing images. Visuals are a vital marketing component when designing your sales page. When our attention spans are all of 8 seconds, an image allows your customers to understand what you’re selling immediately.

Go beyond styled stock images of your laptop and a keyboard, provide custom images that add value and context to your marketing. Does your course include a workbook? A template? Digital downloads? A community? Provide the supporting elements that your viewers can comprehend at a glance. Squarespace, Invision, and Mailchimp do a good job at this!

Create a style guide

Rather than designing the text formatting for the entire page at once (that can be overwhelming), create a style guide. I like to create a separate page for myself and my client’s sites for a style guide. Select one section of your sales page that contains a header, subhead and body copy. For my course, I selected one of the lessons. In your new “style guide” page, play with the formatting until you’re pleased with the hierarchy. If you are more comfortable in Adobe Illustrator, start there!

Once you’ve got one section styled to perfection, apply it to your entire site. Now that wasn’t so bad was it?!

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