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Store Landing Page or Portal vs. No landing page


djcaseanova

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So, I am back and forth. Originally I was going to have a forum and such setup with my store, however there was very minimal use of the forum and then it seemingly was having issues with MYSQL. Long story short, I am about to remove the forums.

When the forums are gone, it will leave me with just the store. I had hopes and dreams of creating a website around the store so I created a landing page or portal on the root directory. This is good because it showed the options of where the user could go. However, with the forums removed, is it still a good idea to have a landing page? It would mean someone needs to click to access the store. I know clicks are important.

For general discussion, do you peeps have landing pages or portals separate from your store homepage, or does your domain.com take visitors directly to your store? Inquiring minds want to know!

Thanks!

Edited by djcaseanova
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"Is it still a good idea to have a landing page?"

That's entirely dependent on your business needs.

For general discussion, for my business, I do have a main site, with a store, bugtracker, CRM, and forums on sub-domains. But accessing any site does not have a prerequisite that they enter through the main site.

The Marketplace has a "portal page" add-on.

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I wanted to see if it was ever a sales driver to not have a 'portal page' external from the store. I will look at the add on and see what it's about. Maybe something I can work with a little better.

 

EDIT: Maybe I missed it, do you have the Marketplace add-on's name that you're referring to?

Edited by djcaseanova
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I have worked with the owner of a skin care products store (CubeCart 3) that has a landing page mod. I would say the owner is emphatic about the importance of the landing page as it provides a far greater range of options on initial promotion of the product line.

The plugin is a "I am 18+" verification statement/agreement page. I do not have a copy so I cannot say if the form elements can be deleted, and the age restriction bypassed by setting it to zero. I do not know if any parts of the plugin are not human-readable/editable.

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I've seen it work both ways, some people want a custom landing page, some use the standard Cube#Cart home page document method. it entirely comes down to your business requirements and what works best to fulfil those requirements.

If you have to remove one or the other and are concerned about gaps in links etc, you can use some htaccess rules to just redirect people to the appropriate location.

 

 

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As others have said, it is an individual choice. There is no point having a landing page unless it is really going to add something as you are otherwise adding an additional click / level of depth before you get to your real website - Google scores pages lower the further they are in to the site (all things being equal which of course they never are !).  Some people dont like the slightly formulaic look of most skins in E-Commerce carts - you can change colours, background images etc but many are still basically the same.  We have tried to create something slightly different with our Retail Therapy skin (see it at https://www.cubecart-demo.co.uk) where there is a full width slideshow at the top and then using our Multiple Homepage Documents plugin, you can then add as many different site documents displaying text or images etc either above or below the Latest Products. The Latest Products section could also easily be removed or amended to make it even less "standard"

Another approach is to have a CMS based front end and commonly this can be WordPress with the store being a link from the WP theme menu.  It is relatively easy to create a WP theme that matches a CubeCart skin and have done this quite a few times.  The benefit of using this is that you can add a huge amount of additional functionality that is available with WordPress while still keeping CubeCart for your store but it is only worth doing if you want to add multiple pages / sections or a blog for example.  Obviously the WP install can also be used simply as a blog with a link from the store and again we have done this multiple times for clients although this isnt what you were asking.

Our own website does something similar (https://www.havenswift-hosting.co.uk) although this doesnt use CubeCart but a specialist hosting package called WHMCS but this is positioned behind a WordPress front end which allows us to have multiple pages and blog and then a link into the client area which is the equivalent of linking to CubeCart

Ian 

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