How to generate and maintain lots of Landing Pages?

Question

Hi!

Currently I have to think of a solution for generating and maintaining lots of static landing pages for a membership-only e-commerce site (e.g. we sell products X, Y and Z but only to our members and we want to make a (SEO-friendly) landing pages for each product). Each page would be almost unique in content and the meta data but they would have almost always the same design / template.

The easiest approach short-term would be to code everything by hand in PHP, but the quantity would make it really cumbersome to maintain them; furthermore, it is possible that some people from the marketing department would like to generate and administer their own landing pages, none of them are tech-versed (not even basic html-tags). Therefore, I was thinking of using Wordpress and modifying it for my purposes.

Is this a good idea? Is there a CMS better suited for this task? Could you recommend me a better approach?

Answer 1

I would not recommend wordpress for an e-commerce site, as it designed primarily to be a blog and therefore would not be particularly easy to adapt.

You may want to look at OScommerce, or another open source e-commerce CMS. These would probably best suit your needs, especially if you wish to actually accept payment online.

Answer 2

PHP is a GREAT way to maintain what you are trying to do. Essentially you said only the content will change. With PHP, you can simply include all of the templates for re-use over and over again, and then you only need to deal with the content itself, which, if you know how to use Server-Side-Includes, can be done by as easily as swapping .txt files that contain your content.

Answer 3

Take a look at this video tutorial http://carsonified.com/blog/design/how-to-design-a-portfolio-site-part-2/, it is not exactly the same thing but look how he uses Wordpress 'customs fields'.

Basically, you create a template landing page with placeholder variables for the parts that change with each page (title, product name, etc.) and then on the post page you can add custom fields that will populate that information.