Custom Landing Page Builder on the Jamstack for Web Marketers
This article was originally published on the WebriQ Blog and can be viewed HERE.
Managing a website this 2021 and beyond is bound to become even more challenging. Huge changes have happened across various industries last year so it is more important to be laser-focused on attracting target customers this year.
More important is the need to engage with website visitors more profoundly, meet their needs better, and leave them satisfied. That is why web marketers out there will become busier as the months go by.
To lighten that load, it is time to switch to the Jamstack or a static site generator for your website. Even better is using a custom Jamstack page builder to make the switch or migration smoother.
What is the Jamstack?
It’s essentially a modern way to build a static website instead of a dynamic website. This provides you with some significant business benefits: speed, security, stability, and scalability. I didn’t intend for them all, to begin with, the letter s, but here we are!
A JAMstack website has an unlimited ecosystem of all of the tools and services you need in the background, but the actual site on the front-end is just HTML.
Building your marketing site on the JAMstack is an efficient and reliable way to combine your content channels and serve it up as a lightning-fast website that your visitors will love.
If you need to add eCommerce, paywalls, a podcast, or some other content to your site in the future, your team won’t have to figure out how to get everything to play ball with your CMS or build a new site from scratch. Instead, they’ll be able to connect new APIs or services to your existing site.
Thanks to progression with modern browsers, static site generators, APIs, and content delivery networks, websites can be built as modular stacks that aren’t tied to specific technologies.
An argument for moving away from plugins
Building a marketing website with well-known platforms that offer plugins, add-ons, and other easy wins for marketers seems like a great idea. Sometimes it is a great idea. But too many times have I seen it quickly escalate into a problematic scenario where site performance is seriously lagging, and the only real solution is to start over and build something that is suited to your needs, without all of the extra bloats.
Hacked up themes, page builders, and plugins for all things can wreak havoc with site performance if you have a dynamic site powered by a traditional CMS. This has a knock-on effect on the user experience, SEO, and overall effectiveness of your website.
Site performance and site speed is an increasingly important ranking factor. Not only that, all of the top-ranking factors these days are related to on-site engagement, which also suffers if you haven’t got a site that performs.
Using plugins to assist the speed at which you can launch marketing campaigns makes sense. But if the result is hindered by poor performance and reduced page engagement — does it still make sense?
Ditching the plugin concept and opting for a JAMstack site that is “just HTML” doesn’t mean you have to give up functionality or suddenly need to know how to code like a front-end developer manages a site and its content. You can still achieve the same results with an ecosystem of tools and services tailored specifically for you. Yes, it takes some development up-front (let’s be real, so does any website) — but the payoff is enormous!
Rethinking marketing projects
As marketing professionals, we should be sticking our heads above the water from time to time. There is a fair share of communication disjoint between teams.
There’s a lot to be learned from spending more time with developers and being bold enough to try emerging technology that directly impacts a digital marketer’s role. If a company is going to ask their engineers and their marketers to work on a website, then the approach needs to work for both teams.
Business case of custom made landing pages
Landing pages focus your customer’s attention on your key selling points and usually don’t have distracting features like navigation bars or links to other pages on your site. If you’re using paid traffic (such as AdWords or Facebook), a landing page is a great way to boost your conversion rate.
If you’re thinking about getting a landing page for your business, you might be feeling overwhelmed with choice. There are many options to consider, like displaying your contact form, how much copy to include, and whether or not to include a video.
Before you make these essential design decisions, you first need to take a step back and consider if you’re going to get a custom landing page designed and coded or if you’re going to use landing page software like Leadpages or Unbounce.
There are two main options for creating your landing page:
- Have a custom landing page designed and coded from scratch.
- Use landing page software to create a landing page based on a template.
To look at these choices, we will compare custom landing pages to software options like Leadpages, Instapage, and Unbounce. These are subscription-based services where you can access an array of templates that you can edit with their web-based software. Both custom landing pages and landing page software have their pros and cons depending on your business, budget, and goals. To decide what’s best for your situation, we’re going to consider the following:
- Design choice
- Ease to create and customize
- Price
- Integrations
Design Choice
In the competitive world of paid traffic and landing pages, the design choice is essential. To get the most out of your advertising budget, you need to send traffic to a highly aligned page with your business, giving your customers the best experience possible and is better than what your competitors are using. To do this, you need to choose a landing page that is a good fit for your business.
Custom Landing Pages
A significant benefit of a custom landing page is that design choice is infinite. You don’t have to worry about the restrictions of existing templates and can create anything you want. However, with so much choice, it’s vital that whoever designs your landing page has a good understanding of UX (user experience) design and conversion rate optimization.
Ultimately a landing page should be judged on its conversion rate. To make sure your custom landing page isn’t a failure, you need a team experienced in conversion-focused design.
Landing Page Software
Most landing page software options give you the choice of many different templates. Some of these are more general, and some are designed for specific industries and applications. You don’t have the same level of choice as a custom landing page.
Price
It’s important to remember that there is a huge difference between price and value. Considering that your landing page will be a big part of determining how much money your business generates online, the best value landing page is the highest converting landing page that you can afford.
Custom Landing Pages
Depending on who designs and develops your custom landing page, you are probably looking at around $800 — $2,000. If you choose a reputable company, this should include a thorough consultation process, purpose-written sales copy, user experience-focused design, design adjustments, and responsive development.
Landing Page Software
Landing page software options use a subscription-based price model with the cost increasing for additional features. Keep in mind some options allow monthly billing, but others require yearly payment.
Ease to create and customize
The process for creating your landing page needs to be painless. You also want to be able to edit the page to improve its performance and react to how your customers are interacting with the landing page.
Custom Landing Pages
Unless you’re an accomplished designer and developer, someone else will likely create your custom landing page. Keep in mind that timeframes may vary depending on the page’s complexities and that it takes time to write compelling sales copy, create a UX based design and code the page to display in all devices and browsers.
Once your custom landing page is live, you will need some basic knowledge of HTML to edit it. If you’re with a marketing agency that performs conversion rate optimization and split testing, they will take care of updates for you as they test specific features on the landing page to improve its conversion rate.
Landing Page Software
One of the significant benefits of landing page software is that it is generally easy to use. Drag and drop functionality allows you to build your page fast.
However, it can also be frustrating to use landing page software due to design limitations. Maybe you want your call to action button at a specific location, but your template doesn’t allow it. This can be overcome through editing the code, but this requires coding knowledge and is often not accessible through the basic pricing packages.
Remember that most landing page software services are subscription-based, so you don’t own your landing page. Once you stop paying your subscription, you’ll no longer be able to use the landing page.
Integrations
Connecting your landing page to the online software is essential for streamlining your sales process and automating your marketing. For example, if you’re capturing contact details on your landing page, you probably want to push your customer’s information into a CRM (customer relationship management tool) or push their email addresses into your email marketing database.
Custom Landing Pages
Similar to design choice, the options available for integrating your custom landing page are endless. You need to ensure that whoever develops your landing page has the skill to set up your integrations properly.
Luckily programs like Zapier, make connecting to different applications simple with their easy to use app connection software.
Landing Page Software
Instapage, Unbounce, Leadpages, and most software options integrate with online software solutions like Mailchimp and Paypal. Keep in mind troubleshooting software integration can be a tricky business. If you run into trouble and can’t get your integration to work, it can be a nightmare to figure out the problem.
If you’ve purchased the cheapest landing page software plan, you might only have access to email support and not be able to solve your problem through chat support or over the phone.
Landing Page builder on the Jamstack powered by WebriQ
At WebriQ, we focus on niche markets where our innovative technology stack and our Websites as a Service (WSaaS) model can work together.
What we created for a typical web marketer is a sort of hybrid — a combination of purpose-built templates that can be used to build branded landing pages following the company’s brand guidelines.
The templates are designed based on best practice conversion principles and the customer journey when they land on the page — a set of ready-made components to effectively build as many landing pages as is required by the business.
Whereas the templates are a low code to even a job for a professional designer/coder, the landing page builds itself is a no-code exercise that can be done by any web marketer familiar with out of the box content management tools.
