Ask HN: How do you build the marketing site for your SaaS app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you build the marketing site for your SaaS app?

9 pointsrevorad10 comments

This is for anyone running a SaaS business - what tools/apps do you use for building and maintaining the marketing site for your product? I mean the home landing page, with the copy, video, testimonials, etc, the pricing pages, blog, and other content pages, which are NOT the product.

I always find that I build up the product part of my app easily, and leave the marketing site for the end and then scramble to put something together before launch. Editing the content later is also annoying, because I need to commit to the repo for it, and I don't like doing that for content.

Just wondering how others deal with this.

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The latest pattern I've been following is to treat the marketing portion of your business as a separate entity from your application. I use an amazon s3 bucket set to static web hosting. Not only is this incredibly cheap but it reduces the load on your application and scales.

I usually use some combination of Rails for the application and I think its a great pattern to keep non-customer load off of app resources. By keeping it as a separate project, your uneasiness surround committing to your app repo marketing changes is alleviated.

Step one, have the app on a separate subdomain from your marketing site.

Initial version, use Unbounce or Squarespace or whatever gets you moving with the least wasted effort.

Later on, you probably want a CMS so it's easy for non-technical users to update. WordPress is happy because of adoption levels, then throw money at WPEngine to handle many of the more common issues for you.

You could use Drupal or some custom thing if you WANT...but make sure you have a benefit equation that justifies it. The more custom your solution is, the more maintenance overhead you commit yourself to.

For stuff like landing pages, set up a site style guide. It may also be helpful to standardize on a style library like Bootstrap or Bourbon Neat. Don't make people reinvent the wheel every time.

Then add tools like Optimizely, Woopra, Kissmetrics, Intercom, Snappy. Your major bases to cover are generally testing, tracking, and customer interaction.

It may also be helpful to add a content management tool like GatherContent. WordPress may be easy to update but planning what to update and aggregating assets for it is a completely different problem.

Thanks, those are the various options I was considering. Have you used any of them successfully for a SaaS app specifically?

We used a WordPress installation with a $8 theme. That made it look pretty decent while I could focus on building the app.

Since then we haven't found a reason to move away from WordPress. It's been fairly easy finding affordable WordPress developers whenever we want to do a big redesign. And allows us to focus on our actual product instead of wasting time building a hacked-together CMS.

Thanks for your response, Anthony. Do you self-host the Wordpress site?

We used DreamHost at first since it was practically free. Then moved over to WPEngine once we got a bit more serious.

The marketing page for a Rails app is usually the index action of a controller I name "home" for me, but I don't mind pushing marketing changes to a repo.

I've seen others write up a really basic CMS for their marketing pages: have a "page" object with a title and body, and render the page named "home" on the home page.

Yeah, that's what I typically do too. But, the result is usually not very impressive. Just looks like Bootstrap. Also, it's not just the homepage, at the minimum there's a pricing and sign up page too.

Just wondering, what SaaS apps do you run?

Hah, I have no problem with bootstrap, as you'll see:

* http://emailtipbot.com

* http://textbooksplease.com

* http://dbinbox.com

I'd put the pricing and signup pages as other actions on the home controller.

Use a popular CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or if you're language specific e.g. Python, Django.

That way you can worry less about the marketing site and more about the product. It also means you can hand-off content and copy to someone non-technical if required.

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