

Ask HN: Custom code for sales/marketing site or CMS? - hkarthik

Those of you building the front sales/marketing/brochure sites for your startups, what are you using to build these sites? We are in the process of designing our marketing site and since it is mostly content, there is some temptation to use a CMS. However, I wonder if this can be a disadvantage when trying to track things like conversion rates, heat maps, etc. We'll also need a blog and I have no issues rolling in something like Wordpress for that. But since it can easily be used as a CMS, there's temptation to do the rest of the content as Wordpress pages too. Simple custom code using something like Sinatra would be a cinch, but carries some overhead of running a Ruby interpreter compared to a simple PHP site.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
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javery
I would go with something like Nesta, it's a simple CMS built on Sinatra that
makes it easy to do very custom things (like you might need to for conversion
rates, etc).

<http://effectif.com/nesta>

I am re-doing a couple of my marketing sites to run on Nesta after trying
Wordpress and just plain old Sinatra and not being completely happy with
either.

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CoryMathews
Wordpress would be a good choice. Its pretty easy to extent compared to Joomla
and drupal. I strongly suggest avoiding Joomla. Don't reinvent the wheel there
are hundreds of CMS out there, find one that meets your needs which in this
case sounds like Wordpress.

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mahmud
Go with whatever is fastest to deploy and easiest to maintain. Most tracking
and A/B testing stuff can be added via javascript (your CMS should allow you
to create "nodes" and other similar content segments; I know Drupal does.)

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bjonathan
Wordpress with a cute ThemeForest Theme if you are bootstrapping is a good
option ! You even have some plugin to install heatmap on wordpress and you can
track your conversions rates with Google Analytics easily.

My 2cents

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hkarthik
Very cool, thank you all for the info! Good to know that most of the Google
Analytics stuff is good enough for tracking conversion rates via Javascript.

