Our landing page optimization course is structured as follows:

• Milestone 1 (5 weeks in): Establish and measure conversion events for the landing pages of an organization's pay per click advertising campaigns. Two things are critical in this endeavor: 1) the visitor's goals in visiting the landing pages; 2) the organization's goals for the item it is advertising. To a large extent, the visitors' goals can be assessed from the keywords they are using and the advertisements they respond to. Organizational goals come from interviews with the organization, what they have on their web sites, and other materials they have produced. Students then determine where the two goal sets intersect and measure what is working and what not by Milestone 1.
• Milestone 2 (a further 6 weeks in): Develop an experiment using alternative landing pages designed to improve the likelihood of the visitor taking the next step in the conversion process. The landing page redesigns are informed by three frameworks: Wider Funnel's LIFT Model, Steve Krug's Don't Me Think, and Loveday and Niehaus's Web Design for ROI. By the time of Milestone 2, student experiments should have been running for approximately one week, and students should have communicated their basic designs to their non-profit sponsors prior to the presentation.
• Milestone 3 (a further 2 to 3 weeks in): Students present the recommended landing page redesign based on the results of their experiment.

Currently, students are coming up to Milestone 2 on November 18. I'm looking forward to see what they have. The course presents a conceptual and technical challenge. Not only do students have to understand visitor behavior but they have to understand the intricacies of writing web pages from scratch and instrumenting them.

Here's a link to the project description students see when they first start the course.