What's your landing page process?
Landing pages take me a lot longer than they should to make.
My messy broken process that never really worked but I always follow it only realising when I'm looking back.
STEP 1: TECHNICAL CHOICES. I'm a coder, this comes first. And it's the least important. I go through all new shiny static site generators and go back to Jekyll. I pick random things that are totally useless... Waste a lot of time here.
STEP 2: DESIGN CHOICES: Pick colour scheme, etc. Tweak some tiny header detail to be pixel perfect.
STEP 3-9999: TWEAK RANDOM THINGS, ADD NEWSLETTER BUTTON. Totally useless things at this stage.
FINALLY, write content. I realise I've missed the most important thing and I can hardly come up with good things. This is a hard part for me.
I've read interesting discussions around here, and been pointed to articles (that I can't remember) about writing copy. Think about benefits as opposed to features was a recurring and important topic.
I was wondering if any of you guys have a good guide or personal process on how you make your landing pages and staying focused while doing it? It's not a technical question, but can include a tech stack if it makes your life easy.
Also, do you publish landing pages before products are ready? I'd be interested to validate some ideas and not sure if this 'hack' still kind of works.
Here's what I do:
Create a persona / empathy map - try to put myself into my customer's shoes.
Write the content outline in a few bullet points. What do I need to communicate to my customer and what's the best possible journey to communicate that through the site.
Write the content draft. Plain text, just titles, paragraphs, lists and occasional image/video placeholder.
Sketch some mockups on a whiteboard or paper, keeping in mind the content structure.
Find a template that matches with my mockups as much as possible and fits with the branding that I have in mind.
Set up Wordpress (that's my usual choice), set up basic settings, install the theme.
Insert the content and start refining it. Make sure it all looks good and makes sense within the flow of the site. At this point I'll also produce or search for stock photos, illustrations, icons, etc.
Ask for feedback from friends, ideally the ones who have experience in marketing/UX. Update.
Ask for feedback from more general public, ideally my target audience. Update.
And yes - I'd definitely recommend to publish the landing before the product is ready. The feedback you'll get will be invaluable throughout your product development.