Weebly Under Construction / Coming Soon Templates & Landing Pages

How can Under Construction or Coming Soon templates (or landing pages) benefit you and why are they important to your Weebly website?

If you are still building your Weebly website, or having extensive re-construction and you don’t want your visitors to see your website yet, an Under Construction or Coming Soon landing page can be helpful to communicate this fact to your visitors.

If you don’t believe me, watch this video from Matt Cutts.  He is the Head of Webspam team at Google (which means he knows more about SEO and search engine rankings than most people!)

There are several other important benefits for you, but before we go over them, let’s talk about what they are, and why people use them.

What’s an Under Construction / Coming Soon Landing Page?

An Under Construction or Coming Soon template is basically an “introductory” page that people see when they land on your website, where the page tells them that your website is still under construction.

When it comes to “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” pages, there are the goods, the bads, and the nasties.

Let me explain.

NASTY Under Construction / Coming Soon Pages

We’ve seen a lot of Weebly users just “Unpublish” their website so that people can’t see what they are doing behind the scenes.

When they “Unpublish”, here’s what their visitors will see:

You don’t have to be a world class designer to agree with me that this is pretty ugly and doesn’t make the visitor want to return even when you’re done with the website.  Wouldn’t you agree?

If you currently have the “Site Not Published” page for your Weebly website, please please please fix it!! :)

Keep reading to find out how!

BAD Under Construction / Coming Soon Pages

We’ve seen some Weebly users publish their website (so they don’t have the “Site Not Published” page showing), showing only the home page and hiding all other pages while they work on them in the background.

This isn’t too bad to be honest.  Your visitor will see the “Under Construction” text, they’ll see your menu bar with the “Home” page on it (where you insert the “Under Construction” text.  You might even insert “Come back later”, or something to that extent.

Not bad, but not great.

If this is what you have, here are a few things you can improve to make it a Great Under Construction / Coming Soon page….

AWESOME Under Construction / Coming Soon Pages

Let’s explore what makes a great Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page.

To be effective, the page must communicate the following to your visitors:

1. Why you are “Under Construction”
2. When will your website be ready
3. How to contact you if they have questions
4. Newsletter sign up (I will explain this later)
5. Where to find you (social media connections)

I’ll go over each of the 5 points, and I’ll show you how to create an awesome Under Construction / Coming Soon page below (it’s a video).

1) Tell your visitors Why you are “Under Construction”

It’s pretty self explanatory if you are starting a brand new Weebly website – you are obviously building everything from scratch!

But just because you are starting a new website, that doesn’t mean you can’t announce to as many people as possible about your up and coming new website.

In fact, you SHOULD tell everybody about it, as the more buzz and attention it generates, the better off you will be when your website is actually completed.

As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a bad press”.  So spread your wonderful news, that you’ll have a kick ass website up and running soon.

If you’re going to do that, it’s EVEN more important that you have all 5 components I mentioned above present in your Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page.

If you are re-building your website, or undergoing heavy maintenance, you should explain to your visitors why you are doing it.  Just saying “Under Maintenance” without further details will leave people lost and confused.  Not cool.

The key is, you want your visitors to return and visit later.  You have to set that expectation.

2) Tell your visitors when will your website be ready

Speaking of managing your visitors expectations, you have to tell them WHEN your Weebly website is ready, so they can come back later.

Consider this.  If you were in a shopping mall and a store is closed, the windows are boarded up for construction, and there is no sign telling when the store will be open.  What would you think?

This rarely happens because the store owners will want people to know when they will open (or re-open) and they want visitors to come back.

This concept is no different from your website.

So in addition to telling visitors why you are under construction, make sure you give them a time frame of when you will be ready.

I’ve seen really neat count down clocks in Under Construction / Coming Soon landing pages, but you don’t really need one.  You can just insert some text telling people that your website will be ready in 5 days (for example).  Keep it simple.

3) Allow visitors to contact you if they have questions

This is something that I see all the time – there is not contact form on the Under Construction / Coming Soon page.

Just terrible!

You finally get some traffic to your website, people are actually visiting it.  If you don’t have any way for them to contact you if they have questions, that would be such a shame.

It’s not difficult to insert a standard Contact Form from Weebly.  It takes less than a minute to drag and drop the form to into your website, and connect it to your email (it can be any email since your visitors won’t know anyway).

If you’re serious about your website (especially if you are a business or online shop), you don’t want to miss out on being able to communicate with your visitors.  They’re potential customers.

4) Newsletter Sign Up

You can also insert a newsletter sign up form into your Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page.

The benefit of getting your visitors to sign up is that you can start sending them updates to update them on your progress.

This is especially useful if you are a business or an online store.  You want to take this opportunity to share with your visitors what your business or website is all about, keep them informed of when it will be open for visiting again.

One of the worst things is when you open your website to the world, nobody visits.  You don’t want that!

So asking your visitors to subscribe to your update newsletter in your Under Construction / Coming Soon page is a useful way to keep your visitors updated on your website, and an opportunity for you to start building a relationship with them.

There are a few newsletter services in the market, but the one that we use is AWeber (you can try them out for just $1).  AWeber is very effective, and allows you to either mass email all your subscribers an email, or you can set up a sequence of emails that will automatically be emailed to your subscribers in a time interval that’s preset by you.

As part of the set up, AWeber will provide you with HTML codes to insert into your Weebly website.  Simply use Weebly’s Custom HTML element to insert the sign up box.  Not too difficult at all to get it set up.

This tool is all about interacting with your visitors, and building a relationship with them, even before your website is ready.  It will benefit you tremendously and not leave you hanging on your website’s big opening day!

5) Tell your visitors where to find you (social media connections)

Similar to inserting a contact form or newsletter subscription into your Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page, you should also insert social media connections such as your Facebook page, Twitter, Google+, etc.

This allows them to reach out to you, or check out who you are.  It’s all about staying connected with your visitors.

It’s simple to implement – just drag and drop some picture elements, upload a few social media pictures, and hyperlink them to your social network.  This will take just a few minutes.

How to build an awesome Under Construction / Coming Soon Landing Page with Weebly

If you want to build a beautiful and professional Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page in your Weebly website, I would suggest you taking a look at either our Elemental Splash Page or Gala Splash Page.

These splash pages are introductory pages, where you can drag and drop any Weebly element into into the page.  The navigation bar is hidden from your visitors, so they can’t access your other webpages (since you are still building them).

On these splash pages, you can insert title, text, pictures, contact boxes, newsletter sign up forms (through the Custom HTML element), etc.  It’s really easy to build an Under Construction / Coming Soon landing page.

Here’s a short tutorial:

Summary

If you are either building a brand new website, or just going through some heavy website maintenance or updates, it’s a good idea to insert an Under Construction or Coming Soon landing page to let your visitors know what’s going on.

This way, it’s much easier to bring your visitors back to your website when you are done and ready to launch your Weebly website.

Better yet, invite them to sign up with your newsletter (such as using AWeber) to keep them posted on your current situation, and email them an announcement when your website is launched to bring them back.

Don’t lose potential customers / visitors because you don’t spend a few minutes to keep them up to date.  It’s so not worth it!

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