Five types of landing pages your website needs, Suzanne Dergacheva | Evolve Digital Toronto 2026
Summary
Suzanne Dergacheva from Evolving Web delivered a comprehensive presentation on strategic landing page design, addressing the common challenge of creating engaging storytelling content while avoiding poorly executed designs that resemble a 'pizza' - where multiple elements are randomly combined without strategic thought. She outlined five distinct types of landing pages that websites need: Why landing pages (like homepages that establish value propositions), wayfinding pages (functional pages that help internal audiences find resources), decision-making pages (product/program pages with clear calls-to-action), lead generation pages (forms and conversion-focused content), and dashboard pages (data-rich content with filtering capabilities). Throughout her presentation, Dergacheva used examples from diverse sectors including higher education (McMaster Engineering, OCAD University, Loyalist College), government (City of Hamilton, BC Housing), museums (Royal Ontario Museum), healthcare (Planned Parenthood Direct), and nonprofits.
She emphasized that while design systems provide beautiful building blocks and component libraries, success requires strategic thinking about user journeys and specific page purposes. The presentation included practical guidance on balancing visual content with accessibility, managing stock photography versus authentic images, creating templates that reduce maintenance burden, and avoiding common pitfalls like filler pages that add unnecessary clicks. Dergacheva stressed the importance of mapping landing pages to user journeys, identifying key differentiation points, and ensuring each page serves a clear purpose in moving users toward their goals.
She concluded with actionable takeaways: requiring design thinking (not necessarily designers) for page creation, eliminating non-essential pages, and documenting best practices for future reference.
Key Takeaways
- •Beautiful design systems can still produce poor results without strategic thinking about page purpose and user needs
- •Five core landing page types serve different functions: why, wayfinding, decision-making, lead generation, and dashboard pages
- •Each landing page should map to a specific point in the user journey and support clear business objectives
- •Templates reduce maintenance burden while still allowing for storytelling flexibility within structured frameworks
- •Visual content requires governance - too much flexibility leads to inconsistent, pizza-like designs
- •Real photography often outperforms stock images for building authentic brand connections, though combinations can work strategically
- •Mobile-first design acts as a natural filter for ensuring content works without heavy reliance on visuals
- •Content editors need clear guidelines and examples rather than complete creative freedom when building pages
- •Accessibility considerations must be built into component libraries from the start, not retrofitted later
- •User testing is particularly valuable for functional wayfinding pages where internal audiences can provide direct feedback
- •Landing pages should minimize clicks by consolidating decision-making information rather than spreading it across multiple pages
- •Default images should be purposefully boring or absent to encourage content creators to upload relevant custom visuals
Transcript
All right. Thank you everyone for joining. I'm going to I might sit for part of this. Um, so this first talk of the day after the keynote, we're delving into content strategy and specifically landing pages, which I think is a is a great topic because every project I work on, everyone's like, let's do let's do lots of visual content. Let's do lots of storytelling. Let's build all these landing pages. Um, and so there's lots to say. Um, for those of you who haven't met me, my name is Suzanne Derva...
