Some background: I am running http://www.conversics.com, a Belgian metrics driven marketing agency focussing on e-shops. What we do is optimizing the online marketing efforts of e-shops based on facts, not convictions. To do this, we use web analytics, online marketing testing and database analysis. I discovered Purlem for our own recruitment campaign towards e-commerce managers.

First of all:
• Your product is great – and trust me, I am generally not generous on compliments! Sliced bread for every internet / integrated marketeer. For this kind of tool a lot of marketing agencies charge thousands of dollars. And you offer it in a DYI way for a fraction of that cost. Really, I am a fan.
And this is what I encountered during my discovery of your tool:
• First I tried the WordPress plugin om my site huureentent.be – which is a very low traffic site I use for experimenting. I got it up and running by disabling the custom permalinks I use for SEO purposes. Which was a show stopper… I am not going to jeopardize my SEO efforts for one campaign I am running. But it worked fine afterwards.
• Secondly, I  found a workaround. I wanted to use this on my main account (http://www.conversics.be) and I didn’t want to run into the same issue, so I created a subdomain (http://welkom.conversics.be) and I set up a clean WordPress install on that domain using the same theme I used on http://www.conversics.be – so nobody would notice they were in fact on another site…. so far so good… but then Purlem seemed to get into conflict with the quite complicated theme I use… returning pages with no content at all.
• So I went back to plan C: setting my pages up using the Purlem tool… I copied the source of my homepage and tried to modify it as much as I could… changing both the index.php of my purlem page and the body of the page using the online Purlem interface. These are my remarks:
◦ I can’t personalize the page title… too bad, but not a major issue
◦ I am having issues to modify the form (I can’t adjust the sizes of the fields, returning a form with very narrow fields – since they were designed for a widget like thing on the right of the page, where I would like to stretch them a little bit)
◦ Next thing I am going to try is to integrate my Google Analytics code in the pages…. I guess that should not be a problem, but I’ll keep you posted.
◦ What would be great to have is some kind of autoresponder system where I could instruct to send somebody a personalized follow up email, let’s say 30 minutes after they have accessed the page but did not fill out the form. Maybe this is already possible, but I haven’t discovered it yet.
• So my point… since WordPress is mainly used as a blog platform (and I like a lot), you might consider redirecting your efforts to more ‘corporate’ open source CMS platforms like Drupal and Joomla. Since they are more focussed towards business users who are probably your main target. Because, let’s face it, why would a personal or semi professional blogger put effort in personalising his message using Purlem unless there is some commercial drive behind it?
• Overall… import / export functionalities are great
• I am having issues with the custom fields I want to integrate in my pages… we offer some free personalised advice to our prospects on the landing page. This means that sometimes we use large chunks of text including some layout and some special characters like ” and so on… but for some reason your tool tries to add some / before and after the “s.
I think I could go on for a while like this…. so feel free to call me to continue this conversation. You have Purlem gold in your hands.
One more thing… your solution is way more than a “personalized URL solution” as you present it now. You have the ultimate 1-to-1 marketing solution for both online and integrated marketeers. Act like it.

Keep up the good work.

I found a plugin that is conflicting with Purlem’s plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-contact-form/

Best,
John

I agree with Tom’s post regarding CMS choice. WordPress has come a long way, but I would be totally onboard with PURLem if it had a successful Drupal integration, or module as we call them.

Here is a discussion thread at Drupal. I am part of that and there are many persons who have interest in this. I’m trying to cobble together a better solution than the Pathauto that I currently use. Race ya!

Can I use my own URL/john instead of the Purlem.com/john as the purl address?