I hate “coming soon” pages. At least, I hate badly designed ones, the kind that don’t tell you when the site will go live or offer to shoot you an email when they do launch. Even worse are the ones that claim they’ll be live in the spring–of last year.
“Coming soon” and “under construction” pages share a common user reaction: disappointment. A few months ago, I was all geared up about a new video game by Junko Mizuno, my favorite Japanese pop artist. I found a link to the site! Joy! But instead of a release date or some production stills, I got a pinup illustration with “coming soon!” Luckily, there was a notification sign-up. So even though I won’t visit the site obsessively for the next year, I will know when the game comes out. The form mitigated my disappointment because now I don’t have to worry that I’m missing something.
When I started working on my new webcomics site, RacheltheGreat.com, I knew it behooved me to put up something while I worked behind the scenes–and not just a feeble “under construction” graphic. When people search for my main character Rachel the Great, RacheltheGreat.com is right up there in the results with my old comics site, SubcultureofOne.com. It seems silly to honor the resulting traffic from such searches. I want those people to come back when my new site (and new comics) are up! And I want them to feel secure that new comics are coming, and that they’ll be the first to know when I’m ready.
I decided the “coming soon” page needed the following:
- A comic of some sort. After my three-year hiatus, my fans are still hungry for new comics. I want to give them something to affirm that yes, I’m making comics, I’ve still got it, I still care, and I’ve still got stories to tell.
- An email notification form for when the site goes live to convert early visitors into later regulars.
- A Twitter feed specific to the site and its progress.
The final "Coming Soon" page for RacheltheGreat.com
How it went down
When setting up RacheltheGreat.com‘s WordPress backend, I installed the Maintenance Mode plugin, which hides your WordPress site behind a single “maintenance page” which you can fully customize. Visitors who aren’t logged in as admins will see the maintenance page, while people logged in to work on the site will see it as though it were live on the web. It was this maintenance page that I used for my “coming soon” page.
I decided to make the comic into a cartoon using jQuery. At the end of the cartoon, visitors are presented with a newsletter signup form courtesy of Mail Chimp. I admit that I made the assumption that visitors will sit through the cartoon or think to click the “skip cartoon” button to sign up. A better experience would have been to keep the signup form visible as the cartoon was running, so visitors would know their options immediately upon landing on the page. If I had to do this over again or for someone else, I would take my own advice, but (you must imagine me pulling a caricature of a pouty artistic prima donna here) I’m an artiste and I had a vision! (In that light, the “skip cartoon” button seems terribly generous of me.)
While I was working on building this page, work wasn’t getting done on the main site. This is a dreadful trap that’s easy to fall into. It seems we are wont to either spend no time at all on our “coming soon” pages or too much time. So I ended up leaving the Twitter feed out, adding it on later.
I should mention that even “coming soon” pages benefit from good search engine optimization. Just because it’s a a single page doesn’t mean that Flash or images-as-text is anymore acceptable than it is on a fully-fledged site. You can turn off styles and JavaScript on the page and it is still understandable (a good indicator of search engine-friendliness).
In closing: Coming soon pages–don’t build a site without one.
Since putting up my page, I’ve gotten many subscribers (surprising considering I made them sit through an entire cartoon!). It’s been a nice little presence-builder and has gone a long way to showing my readership that I’m making good on my promise to return to creating comics.