How do people feel about 'coming soon' holding pages for new site launches - I'm redesigning 4 sites in to one larger one and the migration of users is quite tricky - should I use a holding page to explain as much as I want to our current site users as 'news gets out'? or do people think its annoying? I was going to offer a 'leave your email here and we'll alert you when its launched' type page? Any thoughts?

Hiya Daniel - I'm fine thanks - you? Loving the light nights for my long drive home!

Yes, that's handy - thanks - we've got all that covered, with comms and migration plans and will have URL re-mapping in place etc - before launch, however, as part of the communications I was thinking of running 'coming soon' banners over our current sites but they'd have to click-though to somewhere or people would think they were broken (if anyone ever bothered to click on them!!) - however, I'm not convinced a 'coming soon' landing page is the way to go... any thought on that specifically? Jus

On 13:14:12 27 March 2007 danielb wrote:

hi, Justine, how are you?

Without much detail to go on, I'd:

1. keep the current sites active until you've completed the redesign
2. if you have regular users, include prominent notes on the current sites to explain to them what's going happening
3. contact your email subscribers to let them know too
4. depending on what stage you're at with the redesign, it might be good to seek input (surveys, etc) from your customers to see how you can best serve them with your big consolidated site

The idea behind those 4 points would be to keep serving as many of your current customers as possible & carry on passively gaining new customers (from search, etc) until the changeover happens.

Is that any use?

daniel

Hi Paul! Thats great, thanks - confirms what I thought. I've got all the banners etc set up, I wasn't sure if a 'Coming soon' page would be an annoyance for anyone clicking on the banner expecting to find something other than a 'there's not much to see here' page. But if you guys don't think that's a problem then that's great - thanks everyone! Justine

On 08:19:48 28 March 2007 PaulRouke wrote:

Hi Justine, its Paul Rouke from PRWD in Manchester, we spoke a couple of months ago regarding our user experience and information architecture services.

Regarding a coming soon landing page, I would recommend promoting the new site on your existing 4 sites with banners, perhaps even with some form of interactive banner to provide standout, using enticing messages about any key new features that your site will be introducing. Providing your branding was very clear immediately it may be worth considering a flash site-overlayed banner - without the site they are on's clear branding users would be more inclined to simply close the 'intrusive advertising banner'.

For the people that don't click through to find out more, they at least will be somewhat aware that something new and exciting is round the corner.

For the more inquisitive visitors who wish to find out more, the coming soon page can feature screengrabs of the new site, highlights of key features that will improve how they interact with your site, plus other user experience improvements (perhaps more UGC I imagine?).

Daniels points on requesting user feedback where possible through email newsletters etc will provide further exposure and awareness of what you have lined up.

Finally, the click through could either be to an internal page from your 4 sites or to the new domain name for your combined site - you could then feature the same coming soon information at your new domain, and your idea of trying to capture additional new email addresses for people interested in when the site launches makes good sense - although it unlikely too many people will arrive at your new, non search engine appearing domain name until you fully launch.

Good luck with your launch and I hope this has been of some use - give me a call at the office on 0161 725 8342 if you would like more input...

Paul