I’ve just redirected hubdirector.com to my new launchrock landing page and while the service is brilliant and allows you to very quickly put up a signup page to start collecting email addresses of people interested in your product, I’ve found a few quirks that are not listed anywhere (or at least I havent found them) and thought to share them for the benefit of anyone who is using it or is thinking about it.
Here they are:
- it looks like it counts your own visits among the pageviews in the Insights page even if you are logged in: this skews the Conversation Rate % unfavourably (at least at the beginning) since you are going to visit your own page quite a few times while you are trying to get it right. And even if you are very careful and always use the preview function you are still likely to visit your launched landing page anyway. I did it 18 times
- At one point you are told to redirect your www to the signup page (if you want, of course) but it doesn’t help you in deciding how. I went for a 307 Temporary Redirect but I see a lot of people using a simple javascript redirect that, if I remember correctly, is even suggested in launchrock’s documentation/page. According to most of the SEO sources I know a JavaScript redirect is a very bad thing, SEO suicide.
- when someone signs up and then, very kindly, decides to share your page with her friends using the “Share by Email” option the email that gets sent has the address you set up (info@hubdirector.com in my case) in the From field correctly but hello@launchrock.com in the Reply-To field.
UPDATE: it also looks like launchrock only checks whether an email is well formed but not whether it exists for real or not hence people can leave fake, misspelt or, worse, other people’s addresses. This would be easily sorted by a double opt-in.
As I wrote these are definitely no big deal, just little quirks. Happy launching
