Question
What’s your website stack, the apps and services you add to every new site you make?
Whenever you build a new blog or start a new website, what are the apps and services you add to it first? Google Analytics and Google Fonts? Segment to tie everything together? Disqus for comments?
What’s your website building stack?
Mentioned
#Google Analytics #Development #Websites #Segment #Notion #MailerLite #Gmail #Airtable #Fathom #Typeform #Dropbox #Webflow #Ghost #Wix #Intercom #WordPress #RudderStack #Vercel #HubSpot #CalendlyShare
For optemization.com, my stack is:
- Build: Notion
- Booking: x.ai
- Email capture: Chilipepper
- Hosting: Super
- Tracking:Fathom
@optemization You’ve put together the ideal Notion web development stack here!
Curious: Why do you build sites in Notion versus a more traditional CRM? Do you find anything major you’re missing and wish you could add to your Notion builds?
Chilipepper looks great for forms—almost surprised Notion hasn’t built forms in yet (as Airtable has).
And then, with Fathom analytics, you just add that via Super’s Notion custom domain service?
Previously, I only used Squarespace, Wix and a bit Webflow to creates, and in thise use case I don't feel like I'm missing much. It's solving all my acquisition targets for now. Without super.so the major drawback would be speed. I still have not learned SEO, so this might be a phantom drawback that I have not really considered.
Actually that's a super interesting consideration. Does Super give any options to customize your site header and meta tags? And do you have any pages you know have organically ranked and are brining in consistent Google traffic?
My general philosophy is that well-written, in-depth content that answers things people search for already will do well—especially if the content itself and the site it's hosted on more generally have quality backlinks from other sources (which, you'll most easily win by creating great content others want to share and reference). Everything else is secondary—and as such, broadly, the CMS behind your site doesn't matter nearly as much. Even page descriptions don't matter much when Google often customizes the copy preview based on the search query. Still, nice to be able to tweak things.
Speed may be the other holdback, as Notion isn't the fastest to load, though ... your site seems reasonably fast, so I presume Super is doing some tricks to speed it up?
I have the same view on the relationship between content and SEO but I'm rather ignorant on the latter. Right now, I just make sure to add pretty URLs like https://optemization.com/hamilton-wiki-on-notion instead of optemization.com/bn123j13kj4n...
Yes, Super.so is building in beta a rendering feature that makes pages load fast.
At least it lets you add custom permalinks! That is vastly better than Notion's default page permalinks.
Here's our stack, some of it a work in progress:
Main marketing site:
- WordPress compiled to Gatsby
- Forms via Contact Form 7 plugin but leveraging usebasin.com endpoints, but form captures are tracked via RudderStack and sent to multiple downstream destinations
- Chat: Intercom (loaded via RudderStack)
- Tracking: RudderStack JavaScript SDK (sends info to GA, Autopilot, Salesforce, Snowflake, Hotjar)
Custom landing pages:
- Webflow
- Forms are Webflow native but captured via RudderStack and pointed to usebasin.com endpoints
- Everything else is the same as above
Fascinating: With Gatsby then, you’re basically using WordPress to manage content but then turning that content into static pages. That’d definitely help WordPress’ performance!
Did you choose Contact Form 7 because it lets you use a custom endpoint for form data?
Had you use Segment previously, and if so, how have you found Rudderstack in comparison? I’ve meant to try it but am still using Segment.
- Heroku
- Google Analytics
- Google Tag Manager
- Sendgrid
- Drift
- Mailchimp
And many more :)
Full stack: https://www.martechguru.com/stack/5e38ca7c92308
My blog right now runs on Kirby CMS (a flat-file CMS where you save Markdown-formatted text files to your server and it turns them into a blog), Digital Ocean for hosting (and formerly used Dropbox CLI to sync files—that broke when Dropbox dropped support for symlinks though), Google Analytics for stats, Google Fonts for custom typefaces, and Typeform for signup forms. Years ago I used Mint for analytics; sadly, it's unsupported now, though Fathom seems the closest alternative in spirit and I'd love to give it a try sometime.
If I were building a new site today, I'd be strongly tempted to either try Ghost for a CMS, or Webflow for a more static site.
At PeerBoard we use
- Google Analytics (for landing pages) and Amplitude (for both product analytics and landing pages)
- Notion for wikis, task boards, notes. We use Notion for task tracking and prioritization with complicated weighting formulas and it's great!
- Slack, Github, Gmail - the usual suspects
- Email automation - Amazon SES for our product emails and MailerLite for email chains
- Finally, and as a relevant plug :) We use PeerBoard itself for our product community and blog, as can be seen at community.peerboard.com
We are using WebFlow and I'd say this is enough for some simple cases. The great thing about it is that your design lead can do it all him/herself while not compromising much on the result.
Re MailerLite we wanted something really simple and cheap. I think we're still not paying for it on our volume. Do you think there're much better tools out there?
Yeah, that’s absolutely the tempting thing about Webflow: It makes quite good sites without coding.
In looking at MailerLite’s pricing, they actually look like a good deal especially for smaller send volumes. There’s no perfect email platform, and they’re all at a certain level reasonably similar. MailerLite is just one you don’t see referenced as much, so was curious what led your team to choose it!
Gatsby, Forestry and Vercel as explained here: https://bejamas.io/blog/case-study-bejamas/ (the Jamstack way)
As for 3rd party scripts: GA of course and Mouseflow.
Love the chat-style interviews on your blog; that’s really nicely done!
Hubspot CMS.
Our site was previously built using Wordpress but because we don't have a developer in-house, we found that even the smallest changes required outside help. As a result, we migrated over to Hubspot (a Hubspot migration specialist recreated our website internally for free as part of the switchover) and currently have it hosted there.
Between their drag & drop website editor to their robust marketplace for templates and modules, it's made managing our website incredibly simple and enjoyable. Of course our use of Hubspot's sales and marketing tools made this transition easier, as everything is managed within 1 platform, but from what I understand, the team is working hard to sell this as a standalone product.
For any specific integrations or heavy customization/personalization, Hubspot may not be the answer. But for relatively simple sites being managed by non-technical teams, it's a real game-changer. And as a bonus, Hubspot has native a website chat and personal meeting links are offered, with the former being a bit more enjoyable to use than the latter.
Interesting, that makes a lot of sense if you’re already using HubSpot for most of the rest of your marketing stack.
How well does it work for blogging? Does it let you mark posts as draft while you’re working on them, and schedule to be published at a specific time in the future?
And how deeply does it tie in with HubSpot? Can you, say, customize the content on the site based on who visits your site, pulling from data in your HubSpot CRM?
Those extras sound like HubSpot has both Intercom and Calendly in its sights.
I still think Wordpress rules and their ecosystem really makes it easy to build decent sites without a lot of effort.
WordPress is at the very least one of the most flexible options. It’s perhaps not the simplest for blogging or eCommerce or anything else, but it’s one of the few ways to do them all and more together in one place.
What’s your thoughts on the new Gutenberg editor?
Initially, I did not like it but once you get a hang of it, it's not too bad. There are pros and cons depending on your needs. For instance, it's a PITA to use with blog posts as you often need to rearrange the images etc.
Right I bet. I imagine I’d end up using the HTML editor again (and/or just switching to a Markdown editor) if I were using WordPress regularly.
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Great stack! Thanks for Chilipepper reco, I've just looking for something like this. Thanks and have a great day :)