Creating a Simple Business Landing Page

As more and more people search online using our phone, tablets and computers, having an online presence is increasingly important to generate leads for many businesses. How to build trust and allow potential customers reach out to you, instead of you painstakingly finding them? A simple landing page is probably one of the first to-dos to kick start your online presence.

In this article, I hope to document down the process I took in creating a landing page for an education business.

While all roads lead to Rome, these are the services I took up to create the landing page, in summary:

• Domain registration: AWS Route 53
• Platform as a Service: AWS Lightsail
• Application: WordPress
• WordPress plugins: Elementor, WPForms, UpdraftPlus
• Total cost of ownership: ~$50 (per year)

Lightsail has a clean and beginner-friendly interface.

After spinning off the WordPress virtual machine instance, its about connecting the dots through Networking. Some of the steps include getting a static IP, creating a DNS zone, setting up your domain and name servers in Route 53 etc.

Took me a while to figure out how to set up SSL by Let’s Encrypt.

While setting up WordPress, there will be issues, e.g. default WordPress Bitnami setups, no SSL encryption installed etc.

But not to worry, Google is a great friend and for me there was nothing I couldn’t solve.

One last thing before we move on to focus on WordPress, in order to receive email notifications of new sign up forms on our site, we need to have a SMTP server set up within AWS. Just a hint, the service in question is called Simple Email Service (SES).

Within the WordPress application, it’s much more intuitive with the single standard layout. I started off with OceanWP theme, installed the drag and drop Elementor plugin and also got some help from a Fiverr website expert. She was great!

Elementor is a drag and drop site builder, and provides a structured layout.

Depending on your resource constraints and technical capabilities, I would strongly recommend getting a Fiverr expert to help. The amount of time and pains you can potentially save can be enormous.

To collect leads, WPForms is a great plugin.

The most important step is definitely the WPForms. It is how potential customers can reach out to you.

I played around with the form quite a bit to get it right — I used both pop up form and embedded form.

Last but not least, make sure security is not being put on the back burner. Updates, regular WordPress/SSL scans and backups are just some of the standard steps any administrator should take.

With a proper landing page, you can potentially start to get organic (SEO) and inorganic leads (SEM). Just to set the expectations right, it can take years to build up your SEO, so SEM is a fundamental avenue of leads for many businesses.

In a future article, I hope to write about my experience managing SEM, in terms of Facebook Ads for the start. Stay tuned!