Web Design Tutorials and Tips

Thinking about building a website? Welcome to the club of "happy website owners" – where the headache of website creation haunts us day to day. Even if you have a team of professionals who promise to build a website in the shortest period, it could be several months before the complete website can go live. So, using a "Coming Soon" page is a good idea.

Here are other reasons why you should get a "Coming Soon" page:

1. A "Coming Soon" page is much better than a default message like "this domain has been sold".
2. It’s a good opportunity to collect email subscribers.
3. It helps let people know you in advance. When they’ll be familiar with your project, it’ll be easier for them to lend their support to your efforts.
4. A published "Coming Soon" page will start your domain age counting. While you tinker with your website it’s already been crawled over by search engines.
5. If your landing page is cool enough then there are chances that it’ll go viral and will be included in different showcases.

A good "Coming Soon" page should bring people a clear understanding of what the website will be about. Unfortunately, nobody can definitely say if your page is good enough to rock the web. But if you need tips on how to create an effectively stunning "Coming Soon" page, you’ve come to the right article.

Read Also: "Call To Action" Buttons: Guidelines, Best Practices And Examples

Make an Infographic

Infographics are attractive visual forms of information display that is easy to read, interpret and remember. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll have 2-3 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention and make them stay on your page. Not only must the information be interesting or surprisingly revealing, the usage of the right graphical elements can help make it a keeper. Here are a few interesting examples of infographic landing pages.

Zaarly

This web design has many small elements which can be looked through for hours. It looks lovely and even inspirational. Moreover, the page has a short video integrated there that helps to better understand the future website’s aims.

5minSites

This interesting and original "Coming Soon" page is a kind of run-through before a well-designed website launch. It intrigues the public, and many people will probably leave their email addresses to see the ready-made website design.

Revelation Concept

The "Coming Soon" page of this web design and development company looks like a true infographic. I’d even say that it’s quite conceptual. It’ll be a pleasure to work with the person who had created such an attractive design.

Design & Layout

I had stumbled upon an awful example of a "Coming Soon" page for a web design blog and while I won’t divulge its name or show screenshots of it, I’d like to explain why I think the designs were flawed. For starters, the colours of the page background and the text were too close for comfort: it’s almost impossible to read anything there. It also has three social media icons (which is good, more on that later) which are not evenly spaced. It looks like there should be another icon between the second and third icon. Another blunder I noticed is a Twitter bird with a speech bubble sitting at the bottom of the page: there are no signs or hints to explain what it’s placed there for.

With all these in place, I wonder how many subscribers will this web design blog get?

3 Points to Ponder

To be fair, it could be that such designs were created by web developers without engaging designers or test runs with the general public. They have analytical minds and don’t pay enough attention to the product’s look in general such as in the areas of:

1. Colors. If it’s hard for you to decide which combination of colors looks good enough, use tools to test color combinations (there are lots of free tools for this on the Web). Use the same colors when creating the "Coming Soon" page and the entire website.
2. Call-to-action. It is a must-have but don’t ask people to do several things at once. Keep it simple, dropping their email address, or the option to Subscribe via a simple subscription form is enough. Keep the form in plain view.
3. Social media icons. Modern businesses must be social. People expect to find you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Moreover, if your "Coming Soon" page is good enough, people will help you advertise it by sharing the page via their social media networks.

Engage customers

I understand that it’s not easy, but if you can use some works or ideas of your future site visitors that would be great! For example, when creating a landing page for my photo blog I asked several photographers to allow me to use their work in the page design. About 30% of photographers are against the idea, a third didn’t reply at all, but the rest were glad to part with their work for the good of the site. Now I’m very thankful to them and I’m sure that without their photos it would have been impossible to create such a nice landing page.

PhotoDoto

The seven photos you see scattered over the table were provided by their copyright owner and you can zoom in and view each of them in detail. On the list, you see the site’s wish: to get 1000 subscribers and launch PhotoDoto (this is a Coming Soon page), letting you know that if you want to subscribe to the site, fill up the subscription form.

Ask-e Soluzio Infor

This design looks like a web page mockup. It’s a simple concept with impressive results. Moreover, they do not just ask you to subscribe for updates, but also to send an email with questions and suggestions. That’s a whole different thing, which makes it look more legit.

CGlelo

This "Coming Soon" page announces an opening of India’s "first online shop", but no mention of what they are selling. There is a counter which displays how much time remains before the site goes live. This page also has an interesting slider at the bottom where social media icons are displayed by default. You can also find a subscription form with the left or right arrow buttons.

Squidchef

This bright and funny design clearly explains which goodies will be presented on this site after its lunch, er, launch. The ability to pull off a good pun is an attractive crowd puller.

Accentuate

Look at the bundle of social media icons at the corner right. The company is easy to find on the web and that’s a big plus. This is a kind of trust-mark which online stores usually have, and need.

Shabithishan

Check out the cute social and contact stickers. The rusted screws on the name plate gives a classic, homely, comfortable feeling, as if to say that the web designer is open for communication and he’s ready to talk any time.

BetterBlogger

BetterBlogger creates a sense of intrigue. Thanks to the blog’s title and screenshot it’s quite understandable what it will be about.

Aim at Emotions

Do you think that people are run by logic? No, no, no! Decisions we make more or less depend on our emotions. Very few people will leave their email addresses on some miracle website (which yet doesn’t exist and probably can never be launched) if they don’t have strong motivation to trust you and wait for your website to launch. If you’ll be able to make people talk about you, that will be a great success. You know, curiosity killed the cat, but by nature people are much more curious than cats.

Blue Bird app

Are you intrigued with this "Coming Soon" page? It’s unknown which app launch it is announcing, but the broken blue egg signifies the start of a new beginning that you could be a part of.

Blogger Jet

This "Coming Soon" page is perhaps the simplest one I’ve ever seen: plain text and the sign-up form on a white background. But I bet that thanks to this text the blog owner will get a fair share of subscribers.

ChoicePunch

Which will you choose? Should life be so complicated? Showing a woman looking dazed in the subway (which signifies life’s mundane routines) allows visitors to connect with the woman.

Dead Celeb Jokes

Almost everybody likes comics. It’s funny and turns you into a child again for just that moment. This hand drawn "Coming Soon" page proves that a creative approach is the best option to win the audience.

Be generous

If you have something to share with people, do it! People like freebies and different exclusive things. It’s up to you to choose which goods or services to share in exchange for an email subscription: an e-book, a pack of freebies, access to premium data bases etc. It would be good if you thought a little bit about what your potential customers and readers really do need. Give them what they want.

Gimmr

This eye-catchy "Coming Soon" page allows you to create a Gimmr Avatar in three easy steps and download it. People like such funny photo manipulations, so it’s a good start.

Sweet

Look at that mashup: a resonating lollipop featuring a logo, a link to the twitter account and a sign up form. Every visitor who subscribes gets an opportunity to take part in beta testing of the app. The only trouble of this attractive page is the fact that the app has not been launched yet. But apart from that, Sweet!

Moocup

This "Coming Soon" page also offers you to get an exclusive beta version of the app. The design is very creative and dynamic. Perhaps many people would be glad to have a fur cup like this one.

Filtered.Language

Send us your poetry, short stories, essays, photos, fine arts, etc. for future publications and we’ll let you know when we go live.

The Pink Penguin

Want to have a free iGoogle theme? It will be here soon. Just sign up for it first.

How About Testing?

I’d recommend you to apply A/B testing as it can be hard to decide which versions would relate better to visitors. Sometimes small differences can make all the difference. And at least you can edit the main website design before it goes live. This option is more traditional for landing pages which are aimed at sales actually ut since it’s all about web design you can try to improve your "Coming Soon" page’s efficiency by applying A/B testing.

DesignWebKit

From the start this web design blog launched two "Coming Soon" pages for different browsers, one with blue and another with brown backgrounds. Now I can find only the blue one (luckily I had time to PrintScreen both items), so I guess the A/B testing was finished successfully.

Wrap Up

Well, that was a long post, wasn’t it? That’s just it with web design. There are a lot of things that you have to take into consideration and all these things really matter. I hoped you had a great time checking out the examples though. Hopefully you will be able to take something away from this and give your own "Coming Soon" page a strong viral effect. Best of luck!