Thanks for the feedback! As you mentioned the arrows indicate that the project is an outbound link (links are optional so having a visual indication that something is linked was necessary, though there are certainly other ways this could be achieved).
Pages subscribe to updates in real time, so I think you just so happened to be viewing a profile as it was being edited. Seems like live updates should probably only be on for the editor.
As for the landing page I'm hoping to redo this in general. As a quick first version I just embedded an actual profile so I wouldn't have to update image assets as the design changed, but I can see how this approach is confusing.