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Ask HN: What is a good "coming soon" page? Studies? Examples?

12 points by andre ↗ HN
I'm helping a friend design/develop a new site, and want to put on a "coming soon" page, with an ability for the user to leave an email address or connect to facebook. Has anybody done any tests here? what to put in? what to leave out?

15 comments

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kingsidharth
So much for Coming soon? Just put on an sign-up and 1 line about you.

Focus on shipping instead of building 'Coming Soon' pages.

Just come! Ship!

bmelton
I'm interested to hear this too. On the one hand, I went with a minimal 'give me your email' address form that I could make as attractive as possible without putting too much effort into it -- on the other hand, now that it's out there, I feel like I should have my value prop, an intro, a _reason_ to leave your email address.

It's very difficult to leave it as a static page when I know that it can be better, but I'm fighting the urge to keep tweaking the prelaunch page and instead, keep working on product. I do have a deadline to meet, after all.

Here's what I went with: http://plumrss.com/

wait
Hmm, how do I say this without sounding shameless? I just launched Capturely (http://www.capturely.com) to help people, especially web designers, make Coming Soon pages. It takes care of all the backend stuff for you. I'll stop there, though, before this starts to sound like an ad.

From all the Coming Soon pages that I've looked at (quite a few, lately), they all have the headline, short description and an email form. It's far from real data, but hey, that's how pretty much everyone else does it. I'd be curious to run some real tests though, which, hopefully, Capturely will let me do.

bmelton
Someone else in this thread mentioned 'unbounce'. (I can't remember who mentioned, but I'll upvote.)

You should go check out their landing page templates -- they're quite good. In fact, they're so good that I had to go and edit my 'coming soon' page, even though I'd told myself I wouldn't.

wait
Yep, Unbounce does have some pretty great templates. I'm working on a system for templates. If all goes well, I'll get some "whoa, those look great" sorts of templates soon enough.

And thanks for pointing out the Chrome overflow problem. I just fixed it.

bmelton
Also (and forgive the nitpick, pretty please) -- on this page: http://www.capturely.com/tour, you should set overflow: hidden, or perhaps adjust those div heights ever so slightly.

I'm seeing a scrollbar on each of the text sections. Using Chromium on Ubuntu.

iworkforthem
Er.. just some ideas for you.

- More landing page themes/templates.

- Integration to email marketing software like mailchimp, newsberry, etc.

- Beta sign-up.

- Countdown clock.

damoncali
http://soontyphoon.com is coming soon. On it I collect an email address, and give the opportunity to tweet about it.

But honestly, it's more important to get some text up than to collect info. You want to get google cranking, and unless you have some way of driving lots of traffic, you won't get many to join your mailing list. ymmv

ebun
wordpress + launchpad theme + feedburner