Can’t code, can build a landing page.

I can’t write a line of code to save my life. This perhaps has been my biggest weakness across my career – be it as a graphic designer way back when, a marketing manager and more recently, the Brand Creative Manager.

I’ve always thought that my role was to organise the content, design and overall layout of a page and then I’d handball it off to a developer to actually get it built. And, this has been the case up until I discovered a piece of software that lets me do it all myself – plan, design and build a landing page.

I’m not here to spruik the benefits of Squarespace, Wix or any of the multitude of DYI website builders. While they’re great for building simple websites, I’m talking specifically about lead converting, marketing-driven business landing pages. The type you usually hit after you’ve clicked on a Google Ad or a sponsored social post.

The software I’m alluding to is Unbounce – a browser-based tool that lets you create custom landing pages without requiring any coding whatsoever.

If you’re a marketer and you’ve ever used an email marketing platform like Mailchimp, or Campaign Monitor, you can use Unbounce. If you’ve ever built yourself a simple page in Squarespace, you can use Unbounce. If you know how to do drag and drop things on a page, change some text, and upload an image, you can use Unbounce.

But, rather than me ramble on about its ease-of-use, it’s probably more beneficial for me to list what exactly I like about the platform as well as some of its limitations.

What’s good:

• You can use one of the 100+ templates available to get started (including a training template)
• Once, you’ve chosen a template, building your page really is just a matter of editing text and images

• You can also design from scratch if you’ve got something particular in mind, or you’re translating an existing design from something like Figma
• It’s drag and drop, meaning you can move sections around the page easily

• Editing content is ridiculously easy – just click on a section and type away
• You can cut and paste between pages and easily duplicate existing pages
• Alignment and layering tools make it easy to organise content on a page
• It’s really easy to build forms and create gated content
• There’s a mobile and desktop design option to ensure your page works seamlessly on both and it’s easy to preview either via the inbuilt preview tool

• Tracking key metrics is simple and you can even implement A/B testing to optimise performance
• There are a number of integrations to help Unbounce work with your existing tools. These include email notifications, Google Sheets, MailChimp, Slack, Hubspot, Campaign Monitor and a huge list of Zapier products

• It’s free to get started and as you might have guessed, the learning curve is low.

What's not so good?

• Unbounce is limited to landing pages, so as simple as it is to use, it’s probably not what you’re after if you’re building a site
• I have experienced a few bugs that have required a restart to resolve
• Make sure you save your work as you go – there’s no autosave
• Adding in movement or subtle animation to elements on a page does require some basic CSS and JavaScript knowledge. Luckily, it’s something you can figure out with a Google search (trust me, I’ve even managed to do it).

So, if you’re planning a new landing page for a campaign, product or event and you’re interested in building your itself, why not give Unbounce a try? The worst thing that can happen is you learn a new skill. On that note, I really should learn how to code someday…