Lose the navigation... or not?

If you start doing some research on landing page design, sooner or later you will come across "The Rules of Thumb." I am not sure whose thumbs were used to create TRT, but believe me they exist.

"TRT sayeth thou shalt remove all navigation from thy landing page."

Okay good idea- in fact I decided to follow it when I first read it. I built landing page after landing page, sans navigation. I mean, it made sense... until I tested it. What I found was that my landing page with my navigation bar intact outperformed the TRT version by 30%!

Now don't think for a second I am trying to refute the rule of thumb or create a new one. Chances are most landing pages do perform better without extraneous navigation. But my point is, how will you know if your page works better with or without it?

This is where testing comes in. Without split testing your landing page head to head, there is no way to know. So go on... give it a try!