How to Customize & Publish a Simple Website in One Day
Using Gitlab & Netlify, clone an SEO-optimized template, customize it, and launch it instantly on your own custom domain
Description
This course will take you through the steps to launch a simple but beautiful one-page "coming soon" landing page that's fully equipped and ready to start collecting leads from thousands of visitors to your site. Once you understand the tools and the platforms, you'll be able to launch in less than a day. Plus, you'll be able to make tweaks and changes to your site and see them go live instantly.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Do you want to know how to build and publish a website, but you don't know how to start?
Would you love to create something unique and make it available for people to see?
Are you getting ready to launch something big?
Do you want to create a website that will help you collect leads in the days and weeks leading up to your big reveal?
Do you wish there was a way to launch a production-ready website with little to no money?
Are you overwhelmed with too many choices for building and hosting your web project?
The hardest part about launching a website is getting started. So many tiny decisions to make. It's easy to get overwhelmed. But, I've narrowed everything down, and curated the best services and resources to help you launch your new landing page in about an hour.
After completing this course, you'll have a stunning landing page under your own custom domain name with a form to capture email addresses from your customers giving you time to map out your full website strategy. You'll also learn how to use the powerful combination of Gitlab Continuous Integration and Netlify to automatically publish updates to your site any time you make changes. The principles in this course can be learned and repeated to help launch similar sites quickly.
After completing this course, you will...
be able to publish a simple but beautiful one-page website optimized for SEO on your own custom domain name
be equipped with a simple form that collects email addresses from guests on your website
be setup with everything you need to launch a teaser or "coming soon" style landing page for your next big project
Still not convinced?
I've been developing websites for over 20 years. I've tried SO many different platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Concrete, Yii, Sharepoint, Shopify... way too many. I have also built very intricate custom solutions for myself, for my clients, and for my employers. I've used React, Angular, PHP, C#, Go, Python... you get the idea. I haven't tried everything, but I've tried a lot.
What I discovered along the way is that a lot of people overbuild and overpay on projects. I started looking for a way to get my clients what they wanted without committing to pricy monthly contracts and hefty development costs up front. I encouraged them to consider launching lean and building iteratively on top of that initial launch. In the midst of that pursuit, I found that many service providers like Netlify offer a very generous free service tier that can sustain most of my clients for months.
Imagine launching with almost no out of pocket costs up front. Then, as your site grows and evolves you can gradually increase your costs to match your revenue and your traffic. I did some simple math and found that for a one-page website like we're building in this course, the Netlify free tier would allow my clients to serve thousands of visitors on the website each month. And recently, Netlify added their painless forms integration service into their free tier, allowing up to 100 submissions per month (at least, that's the limit as I'm writing this). When you combine Netlify with Gitlab -- who now allows free private git repos so that you store your website's code securely -- you can automate the tedious process of making changes to code, tracking who made them, and publishing them to your site.
Much of what I show you in this course is a blueprint for how I solve the same problems for my employer. That's the real value of this course. The simple one-page website and lead collector won't solve all your problems. It's just a placeholder as you prepare to launch your next project. But, what I'm teaching you is my process for launching lightning fast static websites using tools that make it deceivingly simple for FREE! If you pay attention, you'll be able to extrapolate from this course a reproducible methodology for launching more complex websites.
Need some urgency?
Every minute that you spend wasting time thinking about what you could do with your website, your customers are slipping through your fingers. While you're busy thinking, put your website to work capturing leads for you. I've done all the work to curate the perfect template and a combination of services that let you launch your landing page with little to no cost.
What You Will Learn!
- You'll publish a one-page website on your own custom domain name
- You'll configure a one-field form for collecting email addresses through your website
- You'll customize your one-page website with royalty-free high-quality background images
- You'll learn how to combine Netlify and Gitlab to create an automated publishing system for your website
- You'll understand what it means to fork a repo in Gitlab and the simplest way to do it
- You'll learn how to make changes to an HTML file using Gitlab's website
Who Should Attend!
- You want to learn how to easily build and publish a website
- You want to build something simple today
- You've been overwhelmed by all the technologies and platforms to choose from
- You want to launch a single webpage that can handle thousands of visitors without paying a monthly hosting fee
- You don't know much about coding, HTML or CSS and don't know where to start
- You want to publish a simple website that's easy to build upon
- You want learn how you can combine Gitlab and Netlify to create a dynamic publishing platform
- BONUS: You want to learn best practices for choosing a domain name