Setting up our landing page - and how we host it for free!
by JoshHi, I am Josh from Excelly-AI :)
Our first goal was to create a landing page that's visually appealing and offers a clear understanding about what our product does.
As I personally have a Software Engineering background and no experience with NoCode-tools, I stick to the following tech stack:
- HTML, CSS/SASS and JS together with Tailwind from a template from UIDesk. I normally use TypeScript, but the template came with JavaScript, so I let that stay as is.
- Webpack as a module bundler
- For the blog, I chose a template from zerostatic themes, which is based on Jekyll. This is great, because it allows us to easily create new blog posts using markdown files.
Now the interesting part regarding free hosting:
We host the page using GitLab Pages completely free. It allows us to host static sites and schedule automated deploys very easily via Gitlab CI/CD.
In short: You can schedule daily build pipelines for free. After building it, the content of e.g. the build/ directory is then automatically available under a specific URL, for example some-project.gitlab.io.
This way, hosting your page is completely free - as long as it is a static website (which holds for Jekyll). The only money you have to spend is for buying a domain.
So every night, our landing page and blog is built automatically, making new blog posts available, while still having the advantages of static websites.
We are very open for any kind of feedback related to our landing page or product in general :) (see our post https://www.indiehackers.com/post/rate-my-landing-page-i-spent-a-few-weeks-on-it-d791f96da3 )
We are excited and currently working on the backend and slack integration, while doing validation. Stay tuned!
Best,
Josh from Excelly-AI.io
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Nice, this sounds like a solid workflow.
Nextjs + Vercel are a super easy option too - Connect github / any git source and have it auto deploy on git push.
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Thanks for your feedback! I was not aware of Vercel, will definitely check that out! :)
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smart! thankyou for sharing this insight.
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Our initial goal was to create a landing page for our product that was visually appealing and offered a clear understanding of what our product does. As a software engineer with no experience in no-code tools, I decided to go with a tech stack of HTML, CSS/SASS, and JavaScript with Tailwind from a UIDesk template. I typically use TypeScript, but the template came with JavaScript, so I chose to keep it as is.
To build and manage the website, I used Webpack as a module bundler and for the blog, I chose a Jekyll-based template from Zerostatic Themes. Jekyll allows us to easily create new blog posts using markdown files.
To host our website for free, we used GitLab Pages. This platform allows us to host static sites and schedule automated deploys through GitLab CI/CD. This means that our landing page and blog are built automatically every night, making new blog posts available, while still having the advantages of a static website. The only cost is for purchasing a domain. -
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Cool workflow. I am wondering, are you writing your blog on html or have you set up some kind of tool for that purpose
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There's a similar possibility for Azure Static websites plus you can have an API.
It takes less than a minute to create a website from a template like React on GitHub, clone it to your desktop, install Azure Static support, and then you'll get it deployed to Azure on every push.
There are a few restrictions though, the worst being that you can' have API requests longer than 45s. Of course, you'll have autogenerated domain names like laughing-salmon.azurewebsites.com
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I am new to this so please pardon my question if it sounds funny, but can you use this method for hosting a dedicated blog/article website and be able to rank it on google?
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Yes, absolutely :)
Just search for „Jekyll blog themes“, set it up, push it onto GitLab and you can write your articles in Markdown format.I am not sure how it will perform if you do not register a custom domain (otherwise it will have a rather uncommom URL like example.gitlab.io).
If you use GitLab Pages and buy a domain for a few dollars per year, then you have everything you need for a blog.
I recommend reading the GitLab Pages article by GitLab itself, it‘s actually really easy
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Alright. Thanks for the response.
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