So If I Can't Use Wordpress, What CAN I Use? (12)

In Part 1, I explained why the STM team tends to have a somewhat... extreme reaction when people say they're running their campaigns using landers on Wordpress.

If you're still doing that or want to do that, I recommend you read that post now.

But if you're on board with the Wordpress avoidance now, but feel somewhat at a loss for what to do instead, this post is for you.

I'll go through the alternatives and best practises for avoiding Wordpress whilst still getting as many advantages of a Content Management System (CMS) as you can!



The Right But Annoying Answer: Flat HTML

There's no question that using pure, "flat" HTML landers will give you the best performance in the long run.

Web servers are faster at serving "flat" HTML than any database-driven content, even if it's coded as well as possible. Designers have the most flexibility, and it's much faster to test wildly different designs in raw HTML than any CMS I'm aware of.

If you want to get started using flat HTML landers, my current preferred setup is to use Amazon's AWS services rather than rent a server. It's fast, it's cheap, and it's globally accessible.

However, managing HTML landers can be annoying. Searching through piles of code for the headline or image you need to change is a pain, and if you need to deploy multiple pages for each lander (on Adwords, for example, where you'll need privacy policies, Terms and Conditions, and similar things) then it gets really annoying.

The simplest way to reduce the annoyance is to structure your landers (or have your designer structure your landers) really clearly. Make sure that the blocks where you need to add text or images are well seperated from the rest of the code, and commented with HTML comments so you can easily find them.

Also, do spend some time thinking about your directory structures. Good organisation of your server can reap rewards when you have hundreds of landers and can't remember what's where.

But if you have multiple pages to edit, or just want to make things faster, you'll probably find you want to move on to...



Nginx Server-Side Includes: Like Flat HTML But Less Annoying

When you're editing lander templates, you'll rapidly realise that you basically have a bunch of blocks of HTML which never change but take up the bulk of the code space, and you're hunting around them for the few small places which you do change.

And if you're like me, you'll probably be thinking "I wish I could save these big code blocks somewhere and just tell the web server to refer to them".

Well, you can.

Both Apache and Nginx have a function called Server-Side Includes, which allow you to separate out chunks of web pages and refer to them by a simple one-line function.

That means, for example, that a complex leadgen page with a Javascript form, header, footer, lots of styles and so on can become

	<!--# include file="/template/header.html"-->
	
	<!-- Put your headline here -->
	
	<!--# include file="/template/beforeimage.html"-->
	
	<!-- Put your image URL here. -->

	<!--# include file="/template/beforelongcontent.html"-->
	
	<!-- Put your long content (for description etc ) here. -->
	
	<!--# include file="/template/footer.html"-->

• Ghost. Specifically designed as a Wordpress killer and does a pretty good job at it! Ghost is incredibly fast, scales very, very well, and is a joy to use. It's much more performant than even optimised Wordpress. It's also optimised for content creation, incorporating Markdown, which is great for long-form content. STM even uses it for the STM blog!
• Jekyll takes a different approach - rather than rendering a page every time a user visits, it just creates the page as static HTML when you save it. It still has a sophisticated templating engine and content creation tools (with Markdown, again), and the fact it generates static HTML makes it both very fast and very secure.
• Perch is an up-and-coming content management system that's touted as being really good at fitting into an existing HTML-based workflow - like most affiliates' workflow. I've not actually used this one yet, but I know several affs use it and love it.
  

Thank you caurmen!

what a great post caurmen, thank you very much! I really enjoyed your speak @AWE

A few weeks before AWE i was looking to improve our landing page creation process and also came across the static site generators like jekyll. But there's one problem, all of them are created to maintain one webpage (one webdesign) - so it's quite hard to get multiple different designs working with it. Am I right?

I found another tool called www.getlektor.com (static site generator as well, but with GUI) which looks pretty solid. there's also a nice backend, but like the others, not a real support for different webdesigns..

Perch looks great too, but it's useless if you want to organize your landers with subdomains like healthnews.com-cnn.com etc. - you need to install perch on every subdomain.. and you need to run it on a vps, no cdn possible.

There's another tool like perch called prismic.

I really like the concept of those site generator, everything written with markdown etc.

Is anyone else using those tools to manage and create new landers? Or do you use your own solution? You should create a SaaS tool, lol

thanks!

@amsterdamer - yeah, the real problem with most CMSes is that they don't expect you to be running a bunch of different page designs. So they all have the problem that they expect a single theme for everything.

There are things like Unbounce that specialise in landers, but they tend to be slow, inflexible, and not great in all geos.

Watch this space - a tool (free) may appear soon...

Originally Posted by caurmen

@amsterdamer - yeah, the real problem with most CMSes is that they don't expect you to be running a bunch of different page designs. So they all have the problem that they expect a single theme for everything.

There are things like Unbounce that specialise in landers, but they tend to be slow, inflexible, and not great in all geos.

Watch this space - a tool (free) may appear soon...

clickfunnels, leadpages, instapage & unbounce, all of them are lp creators, but you have to use their servers and you can't download a html file right away (sure you can rip them again..)

They are good for creating salepages or optin stuff. But if you want to create advertorials or mobile landers i wouldn't use them.

The best solution for me would be more a real static page generator, so not a real CMS. Could be offline too, just a programm where you can add new sites, choose the design, logo of the site, 1sidebar,2sidebar - add images, textes & tracking links in fields and generate a html file.

Auto html encrypt and siterip protection would be cool too. Also an auto upload to your choosen ftp(subdomain) and maybe an auto upload to the tracker (f.e. funnelflux create landers with api..) would be a great feature as well.

I'm not a programmer, quite hard for me to wite a good briefing for programmers. Don't know which code language, webservice or software. Can't say if a coder is good or not, etc. etc.

Yup, I'd agree 100% with Amsterdamer on this. The various SAAS landing page creators aren't targeted at affiliate marketing. The hosting's not optimised for it, and the design tools aren't focused on it.

A static page generator would be good if well designed - it'd be comparatively easy to hook it up to a solid CDN to offer fast hosting too.

I agree with everything that you say, and a great reminder of server-side includes had completely slipped my mind. Enclosed is an old article of how I was on a similar path of discovery. The differences instead Amazon I use rack space storage. And it has its own building CDN and servers all over the world. Let me know if you have any questions I'll be glad to answer.

The No Server Server
Like all great solutions, this one reeks of simplicity.

There is a very good company called “Rack Space.”

They have all servers all over the world. They also provide storage at extraordinarily low prices.

It turns out that one doesn’t need a server to serve up a lander or webpage.

What makes the whole thing work is that each of their storage spaces has a built-in Content Delivery Network CDN).

Storage consists of containers and folders. I usually name the container the country name, and the folders the product name. That lets me select RS server for that country.

So any lander/webpage can be copied right to rack space storage. All you have to do is integrated into voluume with the usual add on at the end of the URL.

If you have multiple Landers for the same campaign (who doesn’t), you just make as many folders as you need.

I would be happy to walk you technical person thru the setup if you like.

Ron Mahon

so whats the go-to solution for a website with advertorials? i used wordpress just because i know it, ghost looks pretty clean and fast... might look into that. any other suggestions?

@trojans10 - Any of these solutions will work for that, but it depends on what exactly your use case is.

If you definitely need a lot of pages that are all interlinked - in other words a genuine, full-scale blog / site - and you'll need to change things on all of them periodically, then Ghost is a pretty decent option, as is Jekyll.

Ghost is simpler to use (in fact it's lovely to use). Jekyll will be faster (although not much), cheaper at huge scale, and probably more secure, but requires more faffing around to set up.

Perch Runway is fantastic If you have a lot of landing page styles that all use the same content structure, for example translations in different geo's.

A word of warning though, its rather technical and in pretty much all cases involves you being balls deep in code to define content structures, lander php etc. Want to add a new content block?.. you'll need to change code in at least 3 places...

You also have to wrap your head around how to shoehorn your content into it's "Collections" approach.

Interesting - that's much the impression I got from reading through the sales page.

It feels like quite an "agency" bit of software, very much targeted at web dev shops rather than end-users.