by Jenn Coyle
April 07, 2014
You can find Jenn doodling and blogging, drinking beer, or running around Philly.
8 Smart Tips for Designing a Valuable Coming Soon Page
In a world where every second counts in terms of gathering your potential audience members and brand ambassadors, it’s extremely important to have a good first impression and to start building your email lists and social media follower count as early as possible.
If you’ve ever launched a website, you probably know how important a Coming Soon page is. Whether or not you’ve used one, you know that you need to use one for your next project or client.
Considerations For Clients
Imagine your client purchases a domain and hires you to design and build their website. Even though you believe your job may only be design related, imagine how much happier your client would be if during the months prior to launch, they were able to gather email addresses and followers for potential customers.
Your clients will be much happier if you quickly set them up with a beautiful Coming Soon page with basic information, so that they will have a web presence and a place to direct their future customers.
Don't Forget Your Personal Projects
If you’ve ever worked on a passion project, you know how long it can inevitably take you to churn up enough creative energy and actually execute your designs. Personal projects are always more close to home and are therefore more vexing.
If you choose to publish a Coming Soon page, you can work behind the scenes while your fan base drums up excitement for you.
Even better: if you set a hard (but realistic) deadline for yourself and publish it on your Coming Soon page with a countdown ticker, you have a public goal that can help keep you on track with your tasks.
The 8 Must Haves for Coming Soon Pages
There are 8 components that you definitely want to have for a valuable and effective Coming Soon page.
Share Your Message
Even though the Coming Soon page is a stop gap between web nothingness and a full blown website, you still need to have a quick message telling visitors what the site will be and what the product or company is about.
Make it enticing. This is your chance to start making people excited about your product. Showcase what you can with beautiful photos, images or captivating copy.
Get Social
This is the time to set up social media accounts for the future webpage. While people are hanging out on your Coming Soon page, they may want to follow or like your social media sites in order to keep in touch and help spread the word. Give people a variety of options to choose from.
Ask for an Email Address
Marketing blogs everywhere still hold the email address as the best thing you can gather from a potential customer. Email is still the proven to be the best way to get in touch with people when you're trying to sell them something. Always ask for an email address on a Coming Soon page, and promise your visitors that they'll be notified of launch.
Countdown to Launch
As mentioned before, a countdown can help you stay on schedule with project completion. A countdown will also give your visitors a realistic idea of when to expect an update.
That said, only include a countdown if you know you can deliver by the deadline.
Include A Freebie
It’s important to gain trust and drum up excitement about your brand. Offering valuable content to your visitors is a great way to do both of these, if your freebie is relevant to your or your client's final website or product.
Offering a freebie easily ties into gathering email addresses and can also make for a great Call To Action, as explained next.
Have a Prominent Call To Action
Your Call To Action can include many options here. If you give away a freebie or a preview after an email sign up or a social share, this will be your Call To Action. Your CTA can also be as simple as asking your visitors to Tweet the page, or share it on Facebook, or share their email addresses to be notified of updates on your progress.
Include a Pleasing Aesthetic
If your branding stage for your project is complete, incorporate as much of that in the Coming Soon page without making it overwhelming.
If your branding isn't complete and you're really not sure you should publish a Coming Soon page if it won't match your future branding, just remember to keep it simple. Having an aesthetically simple Coming Soon page will be better than having no page at all (or even worse, having an ugly default web hosting page that says the domain is parked).
Make it Responsive
On top of having a beautiful Coming Soon page, it's also incredibly valuable to make it responsive so it's viewable on any device.
Medialoot has three beautiful and fully coded Coming Soon templates to help make your life easier.
Free Thin HTML5 Coming Soon Template
This free HTML5 and CSS3 coming soon template features an elegant iOS 7 style ultra-thin, flat appearance. It is responsive and uses CSS3 animation to fade in foreground elements on page load. The working jQuery countdown timer is optional and the blurred background can easily be replaced.
View Free Resource >
Responsive Coming Soon Template
This beautiful Coming Soon solution includes the vector psd source file and fully coded HTML/CSS files with a working count down timer. In addition, it is fully responsive, and the colors can be changed in the CSS by updating just two values.
View Resource >
Free Coming Soon Page Template
This template has a beautiful blurred background that adapts to fill the screen. The download contains a functioning countdown timer that can be set to your launch date, a vector PSD source file for edits, HTML and CSS for instant implementation, and necessary webfonts.
View Free Resource >What do you include on your Coming Soon pages? Do you always use one?
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