LaunchPad, The WordPress Domain Parking Theme

Posted on by Ian Stewart

LaunchPad, The WordPress Domain Parking Theme

If you’re like me, you like registering domains. It’s exciting. But what’s not exciting is watching your hosting company or domain registrar turn your name into an ad-farm while you’re getting ready to launch your next WordPress blog. If you didn’t know it, that’s called domain parking; a way for hosts and domain registrars to capitalize on all the underdeveloped domains out there. That’s why I came up with LaunchPad, the WordPress Domain Parking Theme. To explain: if this theme had a motto it might be, “I’m not your billboard.”

Now with most hosts offering one-click installs of WordPress—I recommend Fused Network—it couldn’t be easier to park your domain in style while you get your future blog ready. Just install WordPress, sign up for FeedBurner with email subscriptions (see instructions below) and you’re set! You get a professionally designed domain parking page—for free—that serves up an RSS feed link and a form for email updates.

But why bother? Well, let’s see what web design expert Mr. Meltdown, of Design Meltdown, thinks of “coming soon” pages like LaunchPad.

This type of landing page has dropped the annoying construction cones and replaced with relevant and useful features. Namely among this is a sign up form to be notified of an actual launch, beta release, or other significant milestone. And of course this is a great way to build a nice mailing list of people to market a new product to. After all, if they actually complete the form they are likely to be very interested. Link.

Sounds like a good idea to me!

LaunchPad Features

  • Theme Options Page
  • Integration with FeedBurner
  • Professional design and typesetting
  • GPL Licensed—it’s free and you’re free to mess with it.

LaunchPad Instructions

Using LaunchPad is simple, it installs like any other WordPress theme, but there’s a couple of things you’ll need to get ready beforehand.

Get a FeedBurner ID and Feedmail

For a theme that incorporates FeedBurner to build subscriptions before you’ve even started blogging, this one is necessary. Signing up for FeedBurner is easy and you were probably going to do it anyway. Visit FeedBurner.com and follow the instructions there. Once that’s done, login and visit your account page.

All you’ll need is the name of your FeedBurner feed address. That’s the text after “http://feeds2.feedburner.com/”. Copy it into a text file somewhere for easy reference.

While you’re here, sign up for Feedmail. Click the publicize tab and look for the Email Subscriptions link under services (as I write this, it’s the 4th item). Follow the setup instructions there—but don’t worry about pasting any code anywhere, LaunchPad does that all for you.

Credit has to go to Nathan Rice for showing me how to do this with his beautiful theme Elegant Blue. Thanks, Nathan!

Write your Welcome Post

When someone subscribes to your new blog with RSS they will be able to read any published posts. You don’t want them reading your “Hello World!” post. Write a simple introduction to your new blog that outlines it’s genesis and your goals so your new subscribers will have something to read.

Set Theme Options

Simply copy your feed name into the options page …

… and You’re Done! You’re ready to launch your blog with LaunchPad!

Tips for Launching Your WordPress Blog with LaunchPad

There is really only one crucial tip for making the most of LaunchPad: let people know you have a URL. WordPress themes don’t work magic. You still have to market yourself. I recommend doing it in stages. First let your immediate friends and family know, then send out word on any social sites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Hello Kitty Fan Club, etc.) you’re a member of. Follow that up with a link on an existing blog—if you have one. If you don’t have a blog I recommend getting one—using LaunchPad while you’re getting it ready of course!

Speaking of getting ready, make sure you read Collis Ta’eed’s two part Building a SuperBlog series on NorthXEast (Part two is here). It outlines the steps Collis took when launching FreelanceSwitch and his advice will help anyone launch their blog successfully. Without my LaunchPad theme, even. Imagine!

View the live demo or download.

Translations

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340 thoughts on “LaunchPad, The WordPress Domain Parking Theme”

  3. This is neat, Ian. I’ll be trying it out soon…

    I would imagine it provides good motivation for pushing through a design as you see people signing up to be notified of its launch.

  4. Can’t wait to see what you’re launching, David. And, yeah it is kind of motivating. Surprising too. I had more subscriptions by email than feed reader.

  5. What an excellent idea! I’ll be using it for a planned local magazine type site. Thanks for thinking of this!

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  24. simple yet effective it’s amazing how some theme’s just click, i know you can’t class this as a ‘theme’ but it does ‘exactly what it say’s on the tin’ :) Thanks!

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  26. Thanks, Roger, I really—wait a minute, scuba-diving in Egypt (check out Roger’s blog)! That’s Harry Houdini stuff! I bet you don’t get bored much, Roger.

  27. :) it’s amazing how the ‘timing’ of a sentence can make you chuckle, like your last one made me :) no no boredom here swapped selling software in London for diving in Egypt five years ago and have never looked back:)

    ps why don’t theme builder’s build into their theme’s simple option’s like the custom rss address and email that you have would make it easier for us non techie’s instead of digging into code we then break many times before we get it right!!

  28. “ps why don’t theme builder’s build into their theme’s simple option’s like the custom rss address and email that you have?”

    Mainly because it’s slightly confusing and not exactly easy. I barely understand it, myself and like I mentioned above, I only got it to work after following Nathan Rice’s example.

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  30. a clever theme!

    the funny thing when I (obviously scanning and not reading the details) checked the demo page, my initial thought was “what? So the demo section is not yet done, I guess I’ll check back later…”. Foolishly not knowing that that’s what exactly the theme’s purpose.

    Respect :)

  31. Thanks, Hafiz. I just subscribed to your blog three days ago, by the way. Great stuff there.

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  40. Thank you for this. One small issue – there seems to be some “mac trash” in your zip file. When I download it to a unix server and unzip the file, I get the launchpad folder, and an additional “__MACOSX” folder with ds_store files.

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  44. Cheers for this brilliant idea Ian! Not only is my current site undergoing a redesign, but I have a few projects being worked on too, and yes, I’ll be implementing Launchpad for nearly all of them:)

    Thanks again for this.

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  52. Great tool. many thanks. I do have one question/ addition, though. Is there a way to further customize the email subscription screens for Feedburner? Now when you subscribe to my feed using Launchpad, I get the ugly blue/ standard message (and following confirmations from feed burner. Can I possibly change the text/ colors/ message of these? and how? it would be a great improvement to this great tool.

    Thanks again and keep them coming

  53. Ed, FeedBurner has some options for email styling under “email branding”. Look at the left sidebar under “email subscriptions” when you’re on the “email subscriptions” page.

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  68. So i have set up launchpad on my domain and set up feedburner, well i think i have correctly.

    But with my feed its the generic feeburner welcome post. How do i start writing feeds from wordpress to automatically update feedburner.

    Im stuck and yes im new to all this any help would be appriciated

  70. Me again, so i’m checking feedburner and the original feed is coming from wordpress http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/wp-rss2.php and when i go into my main account at feedburner and view my rss feed is shows correctly the feed from wordpress but when i actually go to my website and view the feed from the button on the parking page it still shows as the feedburner default welcome messgage?

    Will this change in time or if there something i may be missing? I am concerned as i have already started getting subcribers even before i started writing my feeds so i want people who click the rss feed button to start seeing my posts from wordpress with the updates on how the website is going, thanks.

  71. scratch my last comment, i finally found out what i was doing wrong, i was giving it the wrong feedburner address in my settings, i feel so stupid thanks for your help especially Ian thanks for a quick reply :)

  72. @ Joe: people will be able to read your posts via their feedreader. Not via the WordPress blog using the Launchpad theme. As soon as your definite theme is up, people will be able to view your posts just like on any other blog. For instance mine :)

  75. I thought you might like to see how I’ve used your theme. I’ve recently moved my blog to a new home and I’ve used your theme to handle the re-direct.

    http://blog.yourwish.co.nz/

    After a little customisation, it works perfectly!

    Thanks

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  99. Great theme. However, Feedburner seems to have an issue with validation. (my host is in germany). Anybody else have that issue? Cant generate the feed with out validation.
    “It looks like this is a web page, not a feed. I looked for a feed associated with this page, but couldn’t find one. Please enter the address of your feed to validate.”
    Thanks