This is a very well laid out entry. I wonder if you can apply similar principles to designing the homepage of a social application, where the user does not necessarily buy something, but still needs to be convinced about trying the product.
This is a good post, and presents a topic that is too often pushed to the wayside in web design.
One thing to consider is the path the user takes through your site. The examples in this post are all single-page examples, but often the AIDA process can be better achieved over a 2-3 page browsing experience, where the information is presented in an easy-to-understand sequence. Visitors don't necessarily read your pages top-to-bottom.
Interesting, but our recent conversations about eBooks seemed to indicate that plain, non-graphical salesletters with a straightforward flow worked far better than "traditional" webshop layouts like these. I wonder if there's any comparison here -- does that format only work better for eBooks, or could these guys be making more money by cutting out the chimps?
This post shows how you can implement the old direct mail sales letter as a web page. It does stay on the surface of direct marketing know-how, but it is a good introduction into the matter.
It shows the inner architecture of the sales letter (which is AIDA) and shows well, how this can be applied to the landing page, which I call conversion page.
If you like to get a taste of how one could go deeper into the direct mail tricks here, just google for example "bucket brigade". That should give a hint how said inner architecture of a landing page could made even more tricked out.
And one for the historians. Did you know that 37signals did just that as a service agency, improving conversion rates, prior to going into web services?
