Landing Page with Ember

Design
1

Hi there! I’m sort of second-guessing my decision to use ember for the landing page of my app.

I wanted to get some input from others on whether you use a statically generated page for your landing/marketing pages and ember for your apps or if you use ember for the whole thing. I’ve done the latter and here are the pros and cons I’ve noticed:

(for reference, my company site is https://vmpower.io)

PROS:

  • Ember User data
    • This is available on the landing page - I can check if the user is signed in and rather showing a ‘Login’ link I can use an ember {{link-to}} to move the user directly into the app.
    • We use intercom and we can easily forward user data to intercom whenever someone known hits the landing page
  • Consistent Design
    • I can reuse some components used in the app on the landing page obviously
  • Ease of use of APIs
    • We can hit our apis using ember data

CONS:

  • Load time
    • Load times are longer than a static page because all the script needs to load
  • SEO/Translation
    • SEO only seems to pick up my meta tag information on my index.html and not on the body (even though google says it crawls AJAX sites the right way).
    • Google translate can’t translate my landing page

What are your thoughts? What do you end up doing for your landing page to integrate to the same api as your ember app?

2

Google site:kerstenconstructie.com and see google now understands Ember. I vote for using Ember for the whole thing because you can be sure google indexes your site the correct way. And use ember-pouch to cache your data in the browser :wink:

1 Like
3

If first load/SEO are concerns, that can be addressed with FastBoot.

Another good thing of betting on Ember is that improvements are coming down the pipeline, like elimination of unused code/assets, lazy loading, and more. If you’ve already developed the landing page as an Ember app I’d say stick to it! Going back to a static page is easy enough, if it really proves to impact business in a negative way.

4

What steps have you taken to help Google understand Ember? The Ember portions of my site, while indexed, have no meaningful text associated with them.

5

I see that google indexed your login page so it understands your ember site. Google sees the same routes as Ember Inspector. In your case it can’t index most of them because routes like https://vmpower.io/dashboard/vm-schedules are behind the login.

6

That’s OP’s site. Google has indexed my site, but there’s no content – it just has the url and no text.

7

We don’t provide a description and google indexes all content on http://kerstenconstructie.com/. On your site google understands your site but uses the description. I don’t know if you have to remove the description or just wait for google to index your site better.

8

Sometimes websites has to work on low-end mobile phones with poor connection. Then clients don’t like Ember’s first loading time, which is crucial for landing pages. You can use Fastboot, but it requires node server that won’t respond instantly anyway. Another problem is that time-to-interaction is still significant on first loading.

That’s why I like combination of static pages and ember app. It requires additional work but works fine when internet is slow. To bad there is no static-site generators on Ember. That would be just perfect. I use some static site generator for landing pages and Ember for an app. And many companies do that.

However if you don’t care about poor connection use Fastboot.

By the way https://vmpower.io/ loads quite fast. Good job!