Creating a landing page

If you listen to the many startup podcasts, the one thing that is consistently common among the advice from them when validating an idea is to create a landing page.

What is a landing page? Well, a landing page is a website that gives the visitor quick spiel of your idea and a spot for them to signup to it. The idea is to measure how much interest there are out there to you idea. There are no real measure for this except for the number of signups.

A measure of visitors the landing page is not a good measure as they are only considered as a casual visitors, and does not necessary show real interest in the product.

My landing page at launch.48translate.com was based upon the services of launchrock.com. It uses one of the standard template. I just updated the description and the background to give it a different flavour. Looking at it, it is unmistakeably a page from launchrock.com.

My landing page is my attempt to capture an email address which is a sign of the interest.

I could have gone with a different implementation by using something like weebly.com and embedding a widget from someone like mailchimp.com. Both solutions are free to get started on, but the weebly implementation requires two services, where as launchrock.com only requires the one services.

Some things to lookout for. 

1. When you first starting a landing page, make sure that your naked address and your www address also redirected to it. 
2. Get someone to review your text that you put up on the landing page. Make sure that it is correct. Nothing more embarrassing that publishing some action that you cannot support.
3. Have something on your landing page that could encourage visitors to signup.