Defining the GWT boundary

I have a GWT application that I want to release as software-as-a-service (SAAS) on the web. I have a Linux instance at SliceHost all warmed up and ready to receive a flood of sign-ups.

But now I suppose I've gotta provide a web site to initiate that flood. It'll have cute icons, ecstatic endorsement from customers, my life story, all the usual开发者_如何学C joy and frivolity. And a link - no, make that several links - to the sign-up form. :-)

So what do you reckon: do I add some more custom widgets to my app to make the marketing gumph part of the app? or do I develop a non-GWT web site separately and redirect to my app when the user can no longer resist that nice big green button?

Edit: Just to be clear: from the user's point of view, the web site would look the same in both cases. I'm just musing over how to implement it.

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Keep it outside your app, to make it possible for search engines to crawl your marketing pitch and redirect those floods of new users from their searches:-) Furthermore, separate marketing and possible a blog from your web application to make it much easier have different release cycles, and so you don't have to build a cms in your own web applications (unless it's a CMS management tool of course :-)

I would suggest to only make a tighter integration between web application and marketing pitch if the user can use part(or all) of your web application without having to register or login.

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Right now our app is two separate things, a plain HTML marketing page full of people beaming at their screens with big green signup buttons that go to the app. It works great, and for us it was nice to have something non-gwt that our designer could make and maintain without working with the coder at all. It's seamless, and I recommend it.

I can imagine a time, though, when we'll want to connect them. Say we want to replace the screenshots with live embedded widgets, or make the login button magically replace the contents of the page with the app, etc. I'd switch to a single app before I would make, for example, multiple GWT modules to keep it separate.

Good luck!

PS: Something I didn't think of until just now is that keeping the marketing page plain HTML reduces the download size and warmup time. It's not too bad to download a GWT app, but a separate page is the easiest form of code splitting ;)