Free Blog Sites: Smoothlaunch
Smoothlaunch is a free blog site I’d never heard of before. I found it through Google this afternoon and decided to check it out.
- Plugins: Yes, a very large selection
- Themes: 8, possibly original
- Commercial Sites Allowed: Yes
- Virtual Hostnames: No
- Domains: No
Right away one can see they’re probably serious about building something here, which is great. The landing page has a very nice theme and, given some of the links from the main page, it seems to be very marketing friendly.
Maybe a little too marketing friendly. Using the very same tactic I use at Emerald Nova (no idea is completely original, even if you don’t know of anyone else who’s ever had it before), the dashboard has been replaced by affiliate links. The good news is that Smoothlaunch wants you to use their site for affiliate marketing. The bad news is that the admin pages themselves, seen only by the blog authors, are filled with advertising. This seems a poor choice; the very small number of blog authors you might reach this way will largely be turned off by having their private admin menus filled with Adsense ads.
I was very impressed by the list of plug-ins available at Smoothlaunch. I counted 99 plug-ins available. This may actually be overkill. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m plug-in happy on my own blogs, and I don’t even use 40. Many of the plug-ins they have available duplicate effects, such as the three AdSense plug-ins (all totally unnecessary), three mp3 players, and three social bookmarking plug-ins. There are also some that shouldn’t be here. I won’t say which one, but one of their plug-ins allows users to delete stuff that doesn’t belong to them, and do other things they shouldn’t be allowed to do. This is a MASSIVE security hole, too bad they didn’t test it before going live with their site.
Smoothlaunch does not support virtual hostnames or domains, so your blog will be named www.smoothlaunch.com/blogname. I’m ok with that, but many people aren’t.
The host is somewhat slow. Page loads average around 5 to 7 seconds. The custom dashboard took over 20 seconds to load the first time I logged in. The WedTradeSecrets info in the dashboard also give the impression their site may be part of a link farm. I can’t be sure about that so I won’t say it’s true, but IF it is true, Google will hate this site. Any web page hosted here would be be doomed to “bad neighborhood” Hell.
I liked the idea behind Smoothlaunch, but possibility they are part of a link farm, the slowness of the host, and the huge gaping security hole makes it impossible for me to recommend them. The Internet needs more free blog sites that are friendly to marketing and commercial sites. But one that is run so amateurishly just doesn’t fill the needs of the market.
August 31, 2010 at 5:00 am
number 1 ranked sports blogger on the internet