I've seen the anatomy of a perfect landing page (http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page). But, I've seen two types of splash pages that have generally worked:<p>1) Simple straight forward sign-up now page.
such as: www.localmind.com and www.dayri.me<p>2) Content driven splash page.
Such as: www.webpop.com and www.thinkfuse.com<p>So my question is: Which one is more effective? And why?<p>Thanks in advanced!
Co-founder of Webpop here. Honored to see our landing as one of your examples :)<p>We actually had exactly this discussion internally when we created our landing. We even had at least one prototype of the more mysterious kind with little more than a signup form.<p>I think both can work well, but for our beta we felt it was quite important that our users had an idea about what they signed up for. We're not doing a consumer product, and it wouldn't help us much getting lots of emails from people who would be completely lost when given access to a tool for professional web designers.<p>I suspect that being more mysterious would work well for sites with more of a social networking or entertainment focus.