Free advice on using the free Windows Azure Shared Web Sites to help your Windows 8 App get properly published

Tim Heuer - Using Azure Web Sites to market your Windows App

"In some of our internal discussion lists there was some questions about how to host certain content for their application.  Most of the discussion came up from apps needing a privacy policy (Rule 4.1 from the Windows Store App Certification Requirements).  Some folks had apps they just developed, but no “site” or service they were using.  But they needed to host a privacy policy.  Lots of thoughts were floated around and I suggested Azure Free Web Sites as an option.  I originally suggested it as a simple way you could just have a URL to a privacy policy, but…duh, you could easily use it as a very quick marketing site for your app.

Creating a web site in Windows Azure

If you didn’t know, Windows Azure allows you to create a free web site!  It is very quick and simple to set up once you have your Azure account set up.  After doing that go to the portal and choose to create a new Web Site.  I recommend picking from the gallery and choosing WordPress.  There is such a vast ecosystem around WordPress as a CMS system that it is simple to use and set up. 

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Profit!

Now you have a free site on Azure to host marketing your app.  Of course this helps those getting over the hump with providing a nice place for a simple privacy page, but also enables you to have a way to provide other pages for your app.  You could provide more detail on features, have a form to collect feature requests, whatever.  WordPress is very flexible and the same process you used to create the privacy page can be used for other full-page content.  Or you can explore what WordPress has to offer you.  Again, there are many different ways you can do this and even within WordPress other themes you could choose.  However I think the Responsive one is a simple one to get started with as a base.

You may want to not have “azurewebsites.net” as your site URL as well.  If you wanted you can migrate to a shared instance (not free) and have custom domain name resolution on your Azure site as well.

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Hard to bet free. Besides dealing with the Privacy Policy requirement, this is also a great way to add that extra professional polish to your App.