Gabriel is a recent graduate from Code Fellows. DevHub a technology company that produces products for digital marketers. DevHub launched a stand alone product called RallyMind that is aimed at creating 10 to 10,000 landing pages. Here is Gabriel’s technical account...
My experience with RallyMind was simple, straightforward and easy. In less than a days time I went from a completely blank canvas to having 10 pages deployed. That number could have easily been in the thousands, for each new page I would have just needed to insert a new row into a google spreadsheet, it’s really that simple. It is definitely a great tool to use if speed and quantity are of the essence.
With little more than some HTML, CSS and a spreadsheet I was able to create as many unique landing pages that I needed at an unbelievable speed.
The entire process was really uncomplicated, the two main methods of designing a page oneself is either through RallyMind’s online page builder or an external template. I went the route of the external template, which in my case was made using the most basic of technologies HTML and CSS. After you create the initial template and have it connected to the service you can create as many dynamic instances as needed in a matter of minutes .
“Gabriel is the all around legit developer that Code Fellows produces – with little direction he owned the process from creative to execution in record time! What we thought could take a week…he finished in less than a day.” Mark Michael, DevHub CEO
The planning and design of the page took the biggest chunk of time for me, after that it all came together rapidly. RallyMind uses a macros system to fill in the dynamic pieces of the page with the spreadsheet data. For all the fields that I wanted to have unique data for each different instance I used one of their macros. They have some common macros already set up, for example if you want to insert a phone number you put `(206) 441-4399` in your template. For custom macros one just has to prefix the macro name `custom_`, for example a custom name macro in the template would look like this `${custom_name}`.
Once the master template was finished I just had a few more simple steps until I was able to deploy at scale. First I needed to deploy the template, I went with ghpages because it is easy and free. After that I setup my spreadsheet with all the necessary columns, each macro included in the template needs a corresponding column for it’s data to reside. Plus a few additional columns that RallyMind requires for it to work properly, all of those are pretty well documented on their site. So if I ever had a question about what to do or what I needed to include the answer was readily available. I also had to share the spreadsheet with RallyMind for it to properly work. The last part of setting it up was a configuration file, again this was very well documented on the RallyMind site. What this does is map the columns in the spreadsheet with the corresponding macros in the template so the correct data goes to the proper spot.
After these steps are completed, deploying a new page is really as simple as filling in a row of data in a spreadsheet. It was really a great tool for rapid deployment with minimal resources.