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 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.
ThemeShaper 
341 responses
Very nice Ian!
Thanks, Will!
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.
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.
What an excellent idea! I’ll be using it for a planned local magazine type site. Thanks for thinking of this!
You’re welcome, Sue.
[…] Ian Stewart, LaunchPad is a unique theme originally built for domain parking or blogs not yet ready to for their […]
If I was smart enough, I would’ve used such a theme before the launch of my Logo Design Love blog.
Keep up the great work, Ian. 😉
[…] ha gustado mucho el theme LaunchPad para WordPress. Se trata de un theme pensado para los blogs que todavía no están listos para ser […]
Thanks, David!
(Oh, and make sure you check out David’s blog about logo design, everyone.)
Wow, that is such an obvious idea, I wish I had thought of this. I’m rolling this out onto several of my parked domains now.
Cool. Glad you like it, Michael.
Very cool idea…
Thanks, Tan.
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No doubt its great. Thanks Ian!
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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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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.
🙂 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!!
“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.
[…] sure you’ve seen by now the excellent pre-launch theme called LaunchPad by Ian Stewart. This has inspired me to focus my last plugin on what to do if you want to turn your […]
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 🙂
Thanks, Hafiz. I just subscribed to your blog three days ago, by the way. Great stuff there.
Awesome. Putting it to good use.
[…] Release Page […]
[…] I own lots of domains. Many are parked using special software that puts up an adsense focused page on the domain, in anticipation for either sale of the domain or development. Using the parking tools I do are probably way over the top for the majority of users and can also be quite pricey. So if you’re about to launch a blog, but not quite up to the launch bit then I have a great theme for you – LaunchPad […]
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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.
Thanks for the heads up, Michael. I’m looking into an alternate archiving utility that should remove that small issue.
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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.
Glad you like it, Curvball!
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Thanks. This just came right on time. 🙂