“Do you want to create a website or a landing page?”, that good looking web designer politely asking you that very question. And you just can’t help getting cringy. What on earth is the difference between those two things? Can I just have both? Do I have to pick one?
Okay before you got lost even deeper, here is a simple explanation. According to Wikipedia, A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Simply said, a website is where you put all your thoughts and explanation, your story, your products or services in the form of writing, images, video, music, sound, etc. on the internet.
For example : www.ank-webdesign.com is a website. It is where I put all the information needed about my work and my team so people (like you) can find me on the internet. My website consists of images, writings, link to other resources and a bit of unharm sarcasm.
Get it?
Now, next, so what is the difference between website and landing page? Landing page is usually part of website that consists of 1 detailed page about one specific product/service/campaign that you want to emphasize at one time. For example, your online store have this full featured website with domain www.thebestonlinestoreever.com and this December you want to push the selling for all Christmas hampers since it is really the right time (obviously) to sell Christmas hampers, so you created one landing page : christmas.thebestonlinestoreever.com where you post only about those beautiful Christmas hampers that you sell. And maybe later on February you will want to emphasize on the selling of Valentine outfit for couples, so you will have to create another landing page www.thebestonlineshopever.com/valentine for that purpose. And so on.
Now that you know what the difference, can you answer that question asked by that good looking web designer at the beginning? Do you want to create a website for your company or a landing page? Or both? If you haven’t got any website at all for your company, it is recommended for you to create a whole functional website where you can explain everything important about your company : the history, the team behind the screen, all the services and products that you offer, and most importantly: your portfolio and contact details. Then, if you think you want to create a separate campaign for specific product or event, you can go ahead with adding a suitable landing page.
Landing page is also useful if you are using Google Adwords to drive visitor to your website. How can you differentiate between visitor that comes naturally and those who’s been driven by the ads that you pay? Easy, set up your ads to redirect to your landing page instead of to the main website. Therefore, using Google Analytics you can count how many organic visitors vs Adwords driven visitors.
But that’s another story to be discussed after you have created your website, it’s about SEO, Google Adwords and How to Make Your Future Customers Find You 🙂
