The Perfect "Pre-Launch" Theme for WordPress?

One of the best moves you can do as a webmaster is to get users to sign up even before you've launched your new site.  You can get a good gauge of how many people will be interested, and those early adopters can spread the word to their friends, hopefully building a nice advance buzz.

LaunchRock is a popular choice, often used by tech startups.  Launch Effect is a new WordPress theme that seems heavily influenced by LaunchRock.  It has a small opt-in box for users to sign up, and the ability to upload a catchy background image.  Launch Effect was created by Barrel, a creative agency in New York.

Even better, it's free!  But free doesn't mean low quality.  I installed Launch Rock on a domain I use as a testbed.  For the background, I found a nice photo on Flickr Creative Commons.  Within about 15 minutes, I built this launch page (click on image to enlarge):

Not bad for a quick landing page.  I didn't even take advantage of the full customization options, to really pimp out the sign-up box.  There is a footer that gives credit to Launch Effect, a common feature in free themes is attribution for the designer.  Perfectly acceptable, compared to other free themes that stick a bunch of spam links in the footers.

I did hit one big snag.  When I'm logged in, the landing page looks fine.  But if I view it when logged out, the image is missing and the layout is messed up.  The support page says that sometimes there are glitches with the file permissions that prevents the image from displaying.  Hope this gets resolved soon, or it's a deal-breaker.

The killer feature of Launch Effect is that you can generate unique referrer URLs that subscribers can use to share the website with their friends.  With the analytics data, you can then identify the key influencers who are convincing the most people to sign up.  You could send them follow-up e-mails to build relationships with them. 

These subscribers can also see how many people have signed up with their referrer URLs.  They only see the stats for their individual URLs, while the webmaster sees all the numbers.  This would be useful if you hold a contest where you give prizes to people who drive the most sign-ups, like giving away the latest Apple product.  If there is another theme or plugin that does this, I'd love to know.

You can also export the user data as a CSV file, to be imported with an e-mail marketing service like MailChimp or Aweber.  One question I had was whether these companies would allow that? I know some e-mail firms have strict policies about not importing e-mail addresses without a double opt-in process. They usually require the webmaster to use the e-mail companies’ own opt-in forms for users to sign up with, and for those users to click on a confirmation link sent to their inboxes. 

There are loads of horror stories of bloggers who tried to switch their e-mail subscriber list to another provider.  If the new provider required the blogger to get his readers to opt in again, it usually resulted in losing a big portion of the list.  A lot of people don't want to register again, out of laziness or being suspicious of getting spammed.

To be on the safe side of the CAN-SPAM Act, I might wait until Launch Effect has full integration with MailChimp or Aweber’s opt-in forms.  On Launch Effect's site, there is a "Development Road Map" and it says connecting the theme with MailChimp is a top priority.  Nothing so far about Aweber, which Internet marketers prefer because Aweber is more lenient about affiliate links, as long as the users double opted-in.

There’s a similar free launch theme available from Woo Themes, called Placeholder. From a cursory comparison, Launch Effect has more features and is more customizable. One nice thing about Placeholder is that it has a countdown clock.

Anyway, this Launch Effect theme is an example of what I love about WordPress.  The community can see something that's working well, then rapidly create a theme or plugin to emulate that functionality for WordPress.