Email signup/splash page

Rails
1

Does anyone know the easiest way to put up a splash page where people
can
add their email addresses to be notified when the site is ready? I want
regular visitors to be directed to this page. How can i have this and
still
be able to test/develop the site?

I know a lot of web apps do this while still developing, so i’m looking
for
a solution that i’m sure exists, but i cant seem to find it.

Thanks in advance.

2

On 3/8/06, Manish S. [email protected] wrote:

Does anyone know the easiest way to put up a splash page where people can
add their email addresses to be notified when the site is ready? I want
regular visitors to be directed to this page.

I would create a “signups” model with email_address and maybe a date
field,
to start. Then a “signup” controller with action “index”. You can set
your
environment to point to this controller & action at the root of the
site.

How can i have this and still be able to test/develop the site?

I’ve seen two different approaches, usually in some combination:

  • “Develop locally, publish globally”: Publish the basic sign-up page to
    your server, then stop. Run WebBrick on your development machine.
    Test/develop locally all you want, just don’t send any more to the
    server
    until it’s ready for primetime.

  • “You have to know what’s there”: Put everything on the server, but
    send
    mynewsite.com to your signup page. You then surf past the front page, to
    mynewsite.com/controllername/action or whatever. You may want to use a
    filter to force login on those, too.

  • Joshua
3

I’ve used Josh’s suggestion, which works great, but am also starting to
use
a simple Campaign Monitor subscribe list. It’s really easy, and you get
all
of your people in the system so you can send a blast when you launch.

4

Just in case someone else stumbles across this post like I did, I still
didn’t really want to use my own code to do this, so I searched a bit
and found http://launchsplash.com which does exactly this. Free for 2
domains, $5/month for more than that.

I’m not affiliated with them. Just hoping to help.