Do we seriously need to know how to code to create a landing page template?

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Thanks, I'll check it out!!

[Adam_Pereyra]

Leticia,

Thank you for bringing this point up, I completely agree with you. It is pretty confusing and difficult to create landing pages in Marketo without some coding experience. Same applies to the emails, in my opinion. For that reason, we don't really use Marketo landing pages very often at my company.

In terms of emails, we found that using BeeFree.io worked great for us. It does not solve for your landing page issues, but I am sure there is a simple drag and drop editor out there if the instructions linked above in the other comments do not work for you.

For everyone that posted links to the Marketo Free-Form instructions, thank you!! I am going to take a look at those myself and see if I can create some decent looking pages for my company. I have some HTML coding experience, but not enough to really create a page on my own. Also, I am very rusty as it's been a while since I got my hands dirty with HTML.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

I'm glad I'm not alone in my frustration with this Adam!

[Arvin_Poole]

We're experiencing the same in our company and have tried using different templates without hiring a developer. We have coded some of our landing pages to get us by but have come to realization that it has been difficult to scale across our digital marketing landscape.

We have recently signed up to Unbounce free 30 day trial and realized that this is how landing pages editors should work. It would be nice if Marketo could make their landing page editors a bit more user friendly and update the old templates. They are very 90s.

[Anonymous]

Hi Arvin -

Were you alive and working in the 90's???  Because saying that Marketo landing pages are "very 90's" is absolutely ridiculous if you actually saw what a web page (there wasn't even a concept of a "landing page") looked like in the 90's.  Or maybe - that was your point.  🙂

[John_Stalnaker]

I was!

I think Arvin was referring to the editor, and while I'm sure he was using hyperbole he's not too far off. FrontPage was released in 1995 and Dreamweaver came out in 1998 (and no, I don't consider FrontPage 'high end' ). Marketo's landing page editor is a non-starter for me. There are better ways to achieve the same better results. Doing away with Marketo Landing Pages has been one of the better operational steps we've taken, thanks to Sanford's method for embedding Marketo forms in your own website pages. Is there a downside to it? You get to work in your own CMS and publish pages that look just like your website because they are your website.

I was teaching a professional development course in designing and building web pages at our local university in the late '90s and we were definitely talking about landing pages then, just probably not in quite the same context as you think of them today. Jakob Nielsen had three books out in the 90s, including "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity", and Amazon was launched in 1995. And Pearl Jam!

[Jay_Jiang]

Having used Unbounce, and not being a fan, there are draw backs to using WYSIWYG editors, primarily being that your HTML code is filled it a lot of "bloatcode", trying to make the page presentable and responsive. As a purist, I prefer being given a blank canvas and coding a page from scratch and leaving out the "bloatcode".

Marketo's landing page editor isn't a great UX, but that may be a symptom of letting people write landing page templates from scratch.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Hi John,

thanks for replying. using your own website pages is a seriously valid alternative!!

[Arvin_Poole]

Good morning Stephanie.

Yes, I was very much around in the 90's designing IBM systems during this time. Thanks for the compliment 🙂 My comment was not a shot at Marketo as a company, nor at their powerful enterprise level software as a solution - I am particularly referring to the landing page editor. I have worked with many of the enterprise marketing platforms such Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, Pardot, as well as many of the small to mid business editors such as Hubspot, Thrive Themes, Unbounce, Click Funnels, etc) platform since 2012 and this is not a new topic to the Marketo product team nor community. A 90s website was a reference to the aesthetics "look-and-feel" of the templates provided compared to competitors. Hopefully with the acquisition from Adobe, this will become a topic of higher priority.

[Leticia_DoPrado]

Arvin, I've also used Unbounce and I agree that that's how landing pages should work!!!