How do you organise and manage all your LPs ? (13)
Hi guys!
wanted to take on board discussion about Landing Page management.
Here is my case:
We are a small team of 4. We all work with traffic + we have a web master helping us with landers. We recently started to notice some problems with working flow when it comes to organising landing pages.
For last two weeks we have created over 500 landing pages and this is getting to be a total mess!
To put it short: there is good case we are focusing on: we work on many GEOs with many traffic sources. There is good converting basic LP , but for each GEO it has unique design (css) + sometimes wording + some other variables may also differ + different products are being promoted in some cases. SO 500+ LPs by now.
And that is really hard to manage I should say. We constantly improve our landings - so let say we run test, it shows some result and we decide to apply changes for some 100 LPs on certain traffic source. It takes time to do, while been done, some other test is finished and someone else from a team starting to work on landing you might also be working on.
Or sometimes you just need to apply a new pictures to all 500+ landings, you give a task to a webmaster - he has a queue of tasks - by the time he is finished with those 500, someone else already changed a few of them. So you can't just replace all of them. You need to find those modified - download, apply changes and load again.
So I am looking here for some advise on how you guys deal with your LPs??
Any ideas on how to work with a team and organise the process?
Any thoughts are appreciated
How technical are your team?
The kind of problems you're hitting are the kind that version control (Git or similar) will easily solve, but non-technical users can find version control software tough to get on with.
Failing that, you may get benefits from using some kind of custom CMS (Content Management System). It sounds like a lot of your issues could be prevented by separating your LPs into theme (the basic LP) and content / additional styling. A basic CMS is a pretty simple coding task: talk to a coder about your needs and you'll find that you can probably create something custom fairly quickly.
+1,000,000 for git and github.com.
Hey Caurmen. Thank you for your reply.
Well we are not very technical ourselves but we do have resources to make this work done. I am thinking now about simple CMS system and trying to collect best practises. I found it specially tough and time-consuming to make copies for tests. Mostly only content is changed, but you anyway have to take a copy from a server, multiply it, apply changes and then upload them all + add them into a tracker. Sometimes it's like 70 versions a day
Yup, sounds like a bit of investment in tech could save you a massive amount of time and pain there.
A CMS will probably solve the problem nicely - but do make sure that you talk to the creator of the CMS about the issues with multiple people editing pages at the same/similar times. That sort of thing can get complicated fast, and it's one of the major reasons why version control systems like Git do get so complex.
Coming from some programming background, I've felt a little naughty not using git lately for my LP organization and deployment.
Do you guys have some tips, or personal anecdotes for that matter, on organizing repos for landing pages? Separate repos for each camp? or perhaps by GEO? one big master repo?! I know that everyone does things a little different, but I'd love some insight into organizing repos for what ultimately amounts to folder trees of slightly varied, and translated static pages?
ALSO (and maybe this is my bigger question), any of you guys using any tooling to `git push` deploy LPs directly to S3 buckets???
It feels a little wrong uploading via FTP/web uploads... I should know better by this point in my source control journey :P
we used this , http://s3tools.org/s3cmd , it does the job of upload to s3 from command line, no git push though, but you can use jenkins to auto exec s3cmd after git push
Originally Posted by edgekaos
JGit - which I just discovered - will do fetch and push straight to S3 from Git. I haven't tried it - I've used edgekaos's approach before - but it looks good.
http://blog.spearce.org/2008/07/usin...amazon-s3.html
In terms of organisation, if you're using S3 then one repo per domain is probably the best way to go. I usually use one domain per broad vertical.
Wow, caurmen; that looks even closer to what I was seeking out!! Killer find. It looks like I've got some docs to read up on this afternoon! 
I always just used google drive, and whenever we needed to deploy a new domain or make changes to existing landers, we would just apply the changes to the top 3 performing landers in a particular geo/vertical.
Its not very technical, but it worked. My guess is that you dont really need to make a particular change to 500 landers, and that you'd get the same impact from just applying the change to your top 2 landers.
If I was to re-do things though, I'd definitely read up on caurmens advice though, understand it thoroughly, and apply it.
Also, you can use any static generator with a programming language and a templating engine, and just have the text translated in a csv and smash them out. I.e. if you want to make the same 10 landers across 20 geos or something. I've done that with SEO based sites, to build sites for every city in geo X sort of thing for pay per call -- the principle should be the same I guess.
But I like the idea with Git. I want to look into that.
I have my whole library of LPs on Dropbox organised by geo and verticals.
The best performing landers are then in special folder so I can easily grab them when needed.
Works for me, over the time you will realise that you anyway work with just a couple of LPs that you are using and modifying here and there.
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