Ask HN: How does your web app handle public facing pages?
1 comments
I need to make this exact decision soon too. It really depends on what functionality is required for your public facing site. I’m considering using Hugo for the “marketing landing page” part of my site.
1) Use Wordpress. Have the web app on a subdomain, for example app.example.com and any public facing pages on example.com, and use a CMS like Wordpress serve up any external/public pages (home, about, contact, etc).
Cons:
- You have to use Wordpress. Many front-end devs would prefer to work in a modern framework/library like React/Vue/Angular. (I'll get to the headless CMS in a moment)
- Very hard to use custom designs. If your company has a design library and pre-built corresponding components, then you basically have to have two sets of code.
- VERY difficult to do things like allow a signup/signin modal that is connected to your webapp, rather you have to send users to your signup/signin pages, e.g. app.example.com/register. I also don't know how you handle tracking if you use Segment and the likes.
Pros:
- Easy for non devs to edit content
- Many themes available if you are starting from scratch and can be flexible on design.
2) Use your front-end JS library or just plain old HTML/CSS and build out custom external pages.
Cons:
- Takes more time and effort to build out the pages, since you aren't using a pre-built theme. There are HTML themes you can buy but I've always found them extremely bloated and difficult to wrangle into a front-end framework, and almost always end up tossing them by the wayside.
- Can be difficult for non-devs to edit content. You have to use a headless CMS like Contentful for fetching any content that you may want to change frequently (header text or images for example).
Pros:
- Easy to integrate any custom functionality (tracking, a/b testing, data fetching, etc)
- Much more pleasant development experience. All the code can live in the same repo.
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I would love to hear some of HN's thoughts on this as well, as I've seen both approaches frequently and would like to know if there's something I'm missing about approach #1 especially.