Landing page - Build, use a SaaS, or Buy?
Build your own, use a SaaS, or hire an agency?
I'm debating all of these and can't settle in on a solution. I've built my own (using Gatsby, which I really like), but I realized I dislike doing design work and want to offload that to template designers. Here's what our old Gatsby landing page looked like: https://getspaceti.me (the product and target market has changed a lot since then)
I've used a SaaS (Webflow) - and I liked how easy it was to customize the design without thinking about CSS, but not excited about their blogging features and opinionated payments (also, they charge you extra for those features). Here's what that looks like: https://getspacetime.webflow.io/
And a friend of mine mentioned that his startup hired an agency to build the first version of their landing page. They then adapted that page for v2. This is appealing, but only if the agency uses the right tech.
In any case, the landing page feels so distracting from building our product. Like, I want to be able to experiment on the landing page and customize it over time, but I'm not psyched about building v1. How did you guys make your decision on your landing page?
I have used many SaaS for my landing page (webflow included), and to be honest they just didn't live up to my expectation. I always come back to in-house design and code.
Hey Petervu.
Can I contact you to ask why you disliked some of the landing page builders you used in the past?
Sure thing Isora!
100% feel your pain, I was in the same situation on my last SaaS. I ended up using a template as creating landing page from scratch is hard, also had to learn about SEO, social media tags, image optimisation and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't need to know.
Currently trying to fix this with https://versoly.com/ as an early stage founder you shouldn't have to study how to create a landing page or spend a ton of time designing it.
Nice work so far!
If you're comfortable with HTML/CSS/JS (mostly HTML) my go-to is to buy a template & crank out a site in a weekend or so, polish it over time. https://themeforest.net/ is probably still the go-to (static HTML is $10-$18, consider that only about 10% of templates on sale are well designed, have extensive features / sections / pages, and you'll have to guess on code quality).
It's a good, cheap option to get a result quickly. You just have to be discerning and pick the right template. I usually just browse for a few days or weeks until inspiration hits, play with a few ideas in Sketch / inspector, think through some copy (headline-level), & get it done before I lose my idea / concept. Then refine it later.
One drawback is you'll have to maintain all this with engineering time (relatively easy to outsource though for Engineering time).
Very different than an agency approach. They're going to slowly build an idea, and the benefit is they handle it for you. Usually you pay a pretty steep premium for that, and you get relatively muted outcomes vs. an inside design team.
I loved Webflow when I watched a non-technical design friend crank out a webpage in a week. I hated it when I had to use it myself. Seemed like more work than just mashing around html/css in code. Probably a very specific audience who would feel that way though, learning Webflow is probably easier overall than learning webdev from scratch.
Woah, theme forest is super cool - will spend some time browsing this site!
It's refreshing to hear that other people also dislike building out a site from scratch and would rather have a good template as a starting point. For me, that's definitely preferable than having to set up everything.
Yeah, Webflow is kind of like "write CSS with pictograms instead of actual CSS" - reminds me of the Suzuki method (where you don't learn to read music, but memorize that certain notes are played by a certain finger) - but for doing webdev 😂