by 18a Editorial
First published on TalkingWeb.co.uk
LaunchRock.com allows you to build a great looking holding page for your forthcoming website in just a few minutes.
There are 7 quick steps to creating your landing page with launchrock.com – the first one is simply rock up at their home page and enter your email address.
1. Next you’ll be taken to app interface where you can create your content. The first step is to prepare what you’re going to say and the general look and feel of your page.
The interface is extremely easy to use – you just have to click on a section to change the text that’s in it.
If you’ve already got a logo you can choose to upload a logo instead of just writing the title of your site. Although you’ll want to bear in mind the overall look of the page – you may need your logo as a transparent PNG (with a see-through background rather than being a jpg on a white background, for example) if it’s sitting on a semi-translucent box.
A box at the top of the page invites you to “Upload a file” for your background and you can choose from a range of themes to give change the overall feel of the page. Again, whilst it’s very easy to use, you’re going to have to think about what looks good here – perhaps get your web designer to help you source an appropriate background image that’s big enough and stricking enough whilst being professional and effective.
The clear interface lets you choose whether the main box is centered, left aligned or right aligned, and how translucent the background to it is.
3. Each launchrock.com landing page features a box where your visitors can leave their email address for more information. (I belive you can download a CSV file of these email addresses once your page is up and running.)
One of the main things LaunchRock claims to do on it’s “more” page is to let you incentivise sharing… and it does… but by letting you write a sentence or 2 about why people should share your page which isn’t quite as exciting as I’d hoped when I first read it, but hey – this is free. And there may be more to follow on this in the future anyway.
So the 3rd thing you’ve got to do – Step 2 once you’ve entered your email and are inside the app – is to encourage people to share your new page. You can update the text people see once they’ve entered their email address to offer people something if they share your page with their friends across social media sites.
4. Step 3 in the app lets you customise the email your sign-ups may choose to send to their friends, which is a nice touch which can then encourage more sign ups.
5. Step 4 in the app lets you update the legal stuff with your company name etc.
6. Step 5 then talks you through how to set this baby live – you can use a widget, which is where you copy and paste a few lines of code to make your beautiful page appear on your hosting. Or you can point your domain to the page and have launchrock.com host it for you. Now, this is the section which I fear may blow lots of people’s minds – too much DNS talk of C Names and A Records. I know from personal experience that these are not common terms to members of the public! But it’s how they’ve got to do it, and they can’t go into much more detail without writing guides for every domain-egistrar-on-the-planet’s user panel. So this may be where you need your developer to just sort it for you.
7. Step 6 in the app – preview and launch! And you’re done!
LaunchRock is currently free, but they’re working on extended paid options, which I imagine will include features such as extensive stats and analytics about visitors and sign ups. They’re also working on a showcase to list all the start ups which use their service. Viva la start up!
(If anyone from LaunchRock stumbles across this post before I get chance to contact you, and you want to drop me a line so we can shout about exactly what you’ve got in mind for the service, please just leave a comment / get in touch 