Site, landing page, system: three different jobs

These three usually come up in the same conversation, and often as if they were a ladder: a landing page first, then a site, then a system once the business grows. It is not a ladder. They are three jobs with three different goals, and each one fails if you ask it to do another's.

A site presents the business

A site has an audience that searched for you by name, or arrived on a recommendation, and wants to understand who you are and what you do before getting in touch. It is measured by whether somebody leaves it with confidence.

A landing page is built around one action

A landing page is built for one campaign or one service, and it has a single goal. A visitor arriving from an ad arrives with one question, and if they get a menu of eight options, the money spent on that ad is gone.

This is why a homepage is usually a poor destination for a campaign. It is not bad, it is simply doing a different job.

A system runs the business

A system is not a page. It is where what happens gets kept: enquiries with a status, customers with a history, orders, documents, permissions. Nobody sees the system from outside, and it is precisely what stops a business running on memory and WhatsApp.

What you actually need

Most small businesses need two of the three, not all and not one. A site to be credible, and a system to function. A landing page joins when you start paying for advertising, and it is better to have a separate one per campaign.

The important thing is not choosing correctly on day one, but knowing what you are buying. A site built with no system behind it will work, and it will carry on forwarding the enquiries into WhatsApp.

The mistake in the other direction costs more. A business that commissions a system before it has a steady flow of enquiries builds a process for volume that does not exist yet, and then pays maintenance on screens nobody opens. See where the enquiries come from first, then build the thing that handles them.

We wrote about that last part at length in a spreadsheet holds a list, a system holds a process.

Work out which of the three your business needs now