Should you build a website for your app? – if you app relies on accumulating a large amount of users in a short period I would say yes. Otherwise I would also highly recommend a website for your app.

Why is this?

• You can gather user’s emails who are interested in your app
• You can gather analytics on potential user’s of your app to then use for marketing (E.g Females 21-15 might be interested – so you could focus your advertising on this group)
• It communicators to users that your app is legitimate and you care about them
• It opens up lines of communication for feedback around your app before and after the launch

But it will take so long to build / I don’t want to code it!

Luck for your it is quite simple to build a website – even without coding. And for an app website you don’t need something complicated – it can be as simple as a landing page for your app to generate leads. You have to ask your self – what is the goal of the website for your app?

• To generate new user leads – Build a single landing page
• To sell more apps – Build a single landing page
• To build a community – Build a website with a blog, forums
• To support your users – Build a support site

Lets take a look at how Lon got user emails by targeting their needs. This would result in email signs ups which they market to once they launch the app.

This page is simple and clean, the goal of it is simple to get user’s emails. Lon achieves this by having a simple proposition “Buy furniture now, pay for it later” – the benefit of this is loud and clear. So once they app is launched they send out a nice email to their mailing list.

Why is this important?

When you first launch your app on iOS & Android – you have a grace period of about 3 days. In this Grace period the app stores don’t know how to rank your app so they give you the benefit of the doubt. This is then used to determine how your app should rank in the search results and the like.

So you want to maximize this grace period for the best results – you only have one shot at it when you first launch your app!

How should I build my website?

Depending on the website type you have the following options:

App Landing Page – Unbounce provides easy to build landing pages for leads & marketing.
To build a community, support your users, etc – Bluehost with WordPress is a safe bet. It allows you to easily build a highly customizable website without much upfront work.

If you want something quick, easy and free  you can always use a Facebook custom page as well!