Select Your Language Page is that single page you see when you arrived for the first time on a website like cocacola.com or nintendo.com, a pre-home page, with a list of options: language, country, region, etc, normally related to a big brand or name with presence all over the world or some many others sites with the idea of being seen in any country, like mini-sites or promotional sites even personal portfolios.

There are many sites who redirect you automatically to a language by your physical location, and this could be easy in normal cases but in some cases this not the best option. Let’s say you are from South America but you are in a pleasure travel by China and you don’t know a single word of Chinese, but for any reason you want to go to whateveryouwanttoputhere.com and… Taraaa, is in Chinese.

The reason, if they track your location they can know where you are and intermediately redirect you to the Chinese version of the site… three seconds later you just quit the site because you don’t like the Chinese version. But if they have givento you a Select Your Language Page, you would have made just one more click and you’d be stay much longer on that site. That’s what we all want on our site keep our visitors.

I know this kind of options are normally related to flash sites and I know the design community is not a big fan of this sites, for problems like SEO, keywords, google rank, etc.. I personally love this kind of sites, because they are impressive and interactive, and normally it means: beautiful sites with big loading times for most of them. But their objective is totally different than a blog, or forum. And designers have worked on, to create this pages like any other page on the site even if is not the most visited, so they deserve to be shown and appreciated.

Just after I finished my post about Best Coming Soon Pages, I have the idea for this post and after some time digging deep on the net and after a big list with more than 200 I finally choose the 50 Best Select Your Language Pages that could inspired you. Must of people don’t really give them to much attention; so they hopefully give you some ideas for your next project or for your personal site, if you are thinking on making in different languages.

There are not ordered by preference, only by themes.

So let’s see this collection of 50 Best Select  Your Language Pages.

1. Cirque du Soleil

2. Nintendo

3. Coca Cola

4. Pepsi World

5. Oakley

6. Disney

7. Elg

8. Smirnoff

9. Havana Mojito

10. Absolut

11. Coors Light

12. 26000 Vodka

13. Ferrari

14. Lamborghini

15. Audi R8

16. Bentley

17. Hummer

18. Mini Worldwide

19. Dsinside Citroen

20. Kamaz

21. Prototype Experience

22. Smamot

23. Xperiment

24. Mcq Momies

25. Bank of Imagination

26. Nike

27. Nike Troupe Battle

28. Nike Store

29. Nike ID

30. Wee-Mee

31. Reserved

32. Greenpeace Weather

33. Disney Tower of Terror

34. Digitalic

35. Sukiland

36. Grzegorz Kapias

37. Generation Movie Project

38. Hf3 Coca Cola

39. Halo 3

40. Forza Motor Sport

41. Resident Evil 5

42. PES League

43. Fifa Ea Sports

44. Fifa Street 3

45. Fifa 09

46. Riddick

47. The Sims

48. Spore

49. Touch Generations DS

50. Simcity DS

What do you think after all this good examples, if you think I missed some you may like just let me know.

Do you like Select Your Language Pages? or you hate them?

Call to action buttons are the buttons that you want all your users click on when they are on your site. Normally they’ll link to free stuffs, rss subscriptions, signup or sales pages.

How to design a great call to action button

Your call to action button needs to be obvious and well place so the user should see it in the first five seconds, when scanning your pages, before even think to left the site. Here’s 5 characteristics of a good call to action button.

1. Place

It should be place where the user would expect to find it easily. In the header, beside a product, navigation bar, wherever you place it, it should be not hard to find.

2. Colour

The colour should grab the eye of the visitor and become an interesting point on the page, usually you get this with brighter or contrasting colors.

3. Action verb

The word you use to communicate with your user is really important. Verbs like free (one of the most used), sing up, download, subscribe, etc. Try to use short and active words so the visitor can easily read and make what it says, with out thinking to much. If you have a button with a 3 line text, that is not a call to action button is a text box.

4. Size

This is the most important button on your site and the objective is to have as more clicks on it as possible, if you make it bigger than any other button and give the user a great area to click on, the chances can get bigger, but dont forget, not always bigger is better, have always in mind the design of your site.

5. Clear

Your button shouldn’t be full of text, images or elements. The text needs sufficient padding so it can be read easily. Also put it in a simple place where it can be distinguished form the elements around.

Once we know that, we can easily create our Call to Action Button

Now Let’s Start The Tutorial

Start a new document 300 x 200 px. Use your prefered background color, I’ve chosed a gray gradient background.

Pick #181818 as background and #343434 as the foreground take the gradient tool and select radial gradiet and starting from the middle of your canvas drag towards one of the edges either left or right, top or bottom. You should have something like this.

Select the rounded rectagle tool from the sidebar. (You can also use a custom shape if you want).

Make a rectangle in the middle of your camvas the size you want.

Go to Layers, and make right click on you shape layer (in my case rectangle), then select Blending Options.

Now add these Layer Styles.

You click OK and now you should have something like this.

Create a new layer, name it bright, and make an ellipse over the middle top of the button, using the Elliptical Marquee Tool in the sidebar.

Then fill it with a withe color like this. (Don’t worry if it looks ugly)

Now holding shift, make right click over your shape layer for grab the rectangle as a selection, then go back to your bright layer and now,  go to Select > Inverse or (CTRL+SHIFT+I)

Press the delete key and set the layer opacity to about 15%. You should have something like this.

Now write your call to action phrase, something like: Download, Free, Sign up, what ever you want. Fill it with any color then add these layer styles.

You should have something like this. A Call to Action Button.

Then you can ad a small element like an arrow or a plus it depends on you, to give it more value to your button.

Thats all, now you have a Call To Action Button, in some simple steps.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.  If you like this tutorial just let me a comment bellow with your thought or suggestions.

http://exxcorpio.com

My temporal page is a gray tone Typo based design, nothing incredible but quite and maybe elegant, and based on my new identity,I’ll have it only for one more week so you can visit my coming soon page, and even take a look to my Portfolio 2008, witch is going to be extinguished in the next days.

http://www.thevbexpress.com/

http://www.zoom-studios.ro/

http://www.upstatedesign.org/

http://www.ticketsnoop.net/

http://www.statnip.com

http://someat.com/

http://www.smart-pixel.ro/

http://www.scheduly.com/

http://rank.checkr.co.uk/

http://www.randomcolors.com/

http://www.mealnation.com/

http://www.leaf-ordinary.de/

http://www.komodomedia.com/

http://www.iheartspaceships.com/blog/

http://www.humanbinary.com/

http://www.hosteeo.com/

http://www.hellohumanicons.com/

http://www.gigdom.com

http://www.companyoverseas.com/

http://www.hosteeo.com/

http://www.classowl.com/

http://chkchkboom.com/

http://www.celmates.com/

http://www.aftersomewords.com/

http://www.bluebirdapp.com/

after all this good examples, what do you like about the coming soon pages, and do you have one?