30 Different Varieties of the Landing Page

So I found myself on the TED site recently watching a number of, ok most of, the video downloads they have of some of the remarkable presenters over the years.

One speech in particular, that of Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, caught my attention. It dealt with the development of ‘varieties’ of food products, that is, the reasons why we have 30 flavours of Ketchup and the like. That reasons, as stated by Gladwell, is that we can never create one focus group verified ‘perfect’ version of a cola, or tomato sauce, or coffee – we all have our own personal tastes and preferences of what we think is ‘perfect’.

What struck me as really interesting is how easily the history of that best practice relates to online best practices today. I’m specifically thinking in the area of ‘after the click’ marketing. That idea states that a site's landing/entry page should adapt or change to the search parameters input in searching for it (or if available, a user’s cookies). So the landing page for HP laptops for example, should change based on what the user has searched for, whether it’s consumer gaming laptops, or consumer business laptops, or base priced laptops. It all comes down to being able to cater to the many different preferences and varieties of users - and that’s so much easier to do online than any other media.