What are your thoughts on using no-code platforms for the website home page and other landing pages?
I’ve been a PM at a B2C company for a while, and we’re only now starting to steadily expand. The marketing team wants to host events, thus they need to construct landing pages. In my opinion, this consumes a lot of bandwidth from our developers. Even though we have previously developed event pages, the marketing team’s demands are growing as we gradually focus on growth. We cannot ignore these demands because events have been one of our primary acquisition channels.
I’ve previously used no-code platforms to build websites, and I know they’re simple to use and manage, taking the burden off of developers. But there is something that scares me that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m the one trying to propose it, but before we actually get started, I just want to confirm if there are any details, I need to be aware of.
The fact that our marketing team isn’t entirely tech savvy is one issue that worries me.
My major concerns are:
Is it advisable to use Wix or Webflow for the home and landing pages when a previous iteration of these pages has been created?
Is this something that newly established businesses frequently do? Why, if yes/no?
Is the product, marketing, or tech team typically responsible for maintaining these pages?
Can registrations from these pages be connected to our database? In order to contact users who register on these pages in the future, we obviously want to create an account for them.
Does using tracking analytics cause issues? Alternatively, are there any drawbacks to using these platforms?
You’re looking for a content management system (CMS), which is, in fact, quite typical. Although WordPress is the most popular platform, there are hundreds of alternatives, depending on your tech stack. I’m not sure how your organization works, but I would write down the issue you’re seeking to resolve and let the IT team and engineers develop a decision matrix for the best course of action. There are actually a ton of possibilities available.
@RohitKumar, WordPress, in my opinion, is too difficult to customize for landing sites. But only for blogs is it useful.
I will need to speak with everyone, including my tech team, but I was curious if there were any significant benefits or drawbacks that I might be missing.
You could not be more wrong about WordPress, lol, something like 42% of the web is built on WordPress. It is super easy to customize and definitely not just for blogs. Your developers would probably create a landing page template and then the marketers can build as many iterations of that template as needed. So, you might have an “events landing page template” and then the marketers can make a new page for each event.
Just use a platform. You’re not in the business of building landing pages. Any time your developers spend on them is time not spent on your actual product. There are products out there that can do 99% of what a landing page might want, including customization and analytics.
To really make this decision well, you’re going to want to think about this over a couple time horizons… what do you need to get up and running fast and work for at least a year, and what is your ideal state for the next 2+ years. Ideally, you can leverage some of the work for the initial stage to drive you to a longer-term stage. You really need to flesh out requirements though to figure out what is needed at each stage and if there is anything that can transfer through.
To your questions…
it depends
yes, especially if different business solos aren’t talking
this is where you often run into issues. While the content may be maintained by marketing etc., the page is often maintained by tech… and sometimes you still need tech even for content changes…
@MarcoSilva, We do need something fast and we can build it but they have been asking for a lot of pages recently. We are also making major changes to the main product and these requests are stretching us quite thin.
My opinion is to use Wix. If we have to, we can think about developing a template version in the future but for now, using a tool is better. But am I missing out any of the problems these tools might lead to?
Is there any information about which companies use these tools and which don’t?
Also, I understand that it depends on various scenarios but could you elaborate a little more on what it depends on?
@DamianMarshall, It really depends on your goals…. It’s very easy to spin up something like Wix, but once teams get comfortable using it… getting away from it becomes much harder… and you have to think about the cost of migration not just in terms of tech resources but process changes as well… for (1)
(2) - plenty of companies use platforms that allow marketing etc. to handle content and tech to maintain the page vase, but those as mentioned by some other people are often CMS’s that do require more dev resources… straight up only having one page on Wix while others aren’t, is something I haven’t heard of much, not that it’s done / I’ve just never done it
This is a technical question that depends so thoroughly on your team, your existing stack, and a bunch of other details, I can’t be helpful - anything can be done, the bigger question is how long it takes
You can use the same analytics even if some pages are in Wix and others aren’t, it just really is a configuration question - what can be weird is following the path of customers to Wix and back, and you may need some custom code to make it all work.
The analytics portion is, in fact, what scares me the most.
Wix came to mind because I believe that for now, comfort is what matters. I believe that landing pages alone would be more than sufficient. In that case, I’m hoping we are at a more advanced stage with a larger team. If the need does arise for a more detailed page, we could develop it again.
By the way, is there a business justification for all of this? Because even if they tell you to leap, you need to specify how high… Although they hardly ever need it or even have a good reason, gems frequently request the moon.
Yes, bring in new clients. As I’ve already indicated, holding events has aided us in growing our user base and boosting engagement. Events typically do this, but without them, we would have been at a very depressing number. Having events has significantly altered how users interact with our product.
You need more than simply a low-code platform and a few tech-savvy marketing personnel. You need a roadmap outlining the business’s strategy and how IT and marketing fit together. It sounds like the top level is setting priorities and providing guidance.
(Also, depending on how these landing pages appear, Marketing may be able to do 90% of it in Illustrator/Photoshop/Canva, after which you can plop the entire image over a blank landing page and add a few buttons.)
Despite being a no-code tool, a lot of professionals and freelancers make a living off of WordPress because they can code. So, you might know WordPress as a no-code tool – but some people are making huge money from it because they can code. This means WordPress is both a code and no-code tool. By using no-code, you don’t have total control of, so that you take a certain risk. This limitation may be an open invitation to security opposition because if your no-code platform gets hacked, it can instantly make your application and the user data vulnerable to certain risks.