I am a big fan of Bootstrap and I know it quite well and hence I always prefer it when I am putting a landing page in place. 

From a design perspective I want the website to have a fully white background with black fonts. I do not want unnecessary colours in the background. 

Designing the website

As this is my preferred choice I had already in the past downloaded a free theme matching my preference and integrated it with Codeigniter 3. I use this as my starter kit for all landing pages. 

So starting the landing page from a design perspective was a piece of cake as all I had to do was checkout this repository locally and start working. 

I created a new repo for the DaySupport website and pushed the starter kit to this new repo. I then created the "develop" branch. Though I am the only developer working on this repo I still find it convenient to have the right branching strategy. 

Configuring the server

The first step was to create two A records with the DNS service provider so that both the named domain and www are pointing to the server. I kept the TTL to 1 minute so that the propagation is as fast as possible. 

After creating the DNS entries I logged into my Linux machine and created a directory for the website code to reside in and also created virtual hosts in Apache so that the website works fine. I used Letsencrypt for https. 

Deploying code

I use bitbucket to manage my code and Jenkins for CI and CD. I created the web hook in bitbucket so that it is connected to my Jenkins setup. I created the required credentials in Jenkins and wrote the pipeline steps in Jenkinsfile within the source code. 

With everything set up I ran the build for the first time and it successfully deployed and voila the starter kit website was live. 

Website structure

The starter kit that I used already had the basic structure that a saas business needs. Pages like the pricing page, about us page etc were in place with the right template. 

I reviewed it once and added a few more product specific pages like features, comparison, resources etc with empty templates. I will add the content later. 

While building the website structure I also ensured that everything was SEO friendly so that we do not have to change anything drastically in the future. 
Writing content

With the website structure ready I began writing content for the website. I strongly believe the content for the website should be written by someone who is kind of an expert with the product and the problem it is intended to solve. 

I use google docs for all my content. I created a folder and started creating documents inside it. 

Later in the process I realised that this is going to take me longer to complete and finishing all the content within a weekend is difficult to achieve. So I stuck with a few important pages like the home page, about us page, contact us page and the pricing page. 

I will write the content of the other pages gradually in the coming weeks. I will strike a healthy balance between building a feature and writing content on the website for it. 

Reference links

Https in Apache with Letsencrypt

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