Didn't know about “hero shot”—now I see where "hero-unit" class in Twitter bootstrap CSS comes from. =)
Overall, although some points may look obvious, the advice is very well-written and structured, and I think is worth a lot. Looking forward to future posts.
If you want a effective landing page, you need to do CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), for this you need to know usability, make test A/B and measuring analytics data =)
He mentions this at the end as his next article. But it should be in this list as a must do.
A problem with marketing is often peoples opinion of there skill out-weighs the reality. And you will have an influential person like a senior exec trying to add things to pages or do their own messaging. With A/B testing this is fine, you make a few versions of the page and then the results give answer. It really forces people to back their opinion and not just throw it out there. And shuts up those people that are consistently wrong. All while being much less personal than duking it out over opinions that can create friction.... yes it is essential.
Similar to bootstrap for twitter, it would be nice if someone comes up with a "bootstrap landing page" which contains all the elements which muddylemon suggests and which is further customisable. or does it already exist?
There are some options out there, from landing page themes on sites like themeforest, to plugin systems like premise and Saas apps like Unbounce to whatever you would call Prosper202 to... well, there's a lot of stuff out there.
That said, twitter bootstrap has most of those elements, even down to the hero-unit already built in, so I guess it would qualify for that too.
I gave this as an introductory read to our junior web marketing team. it would be really nice to have a bootstrap landing page and I am surprised why Google does not provide such resources?