Do you remember the days when coming soon pages were “men-at-work” construction signs and graphics? I know I do, and designing coming soon pages has leaped and bounded since these dark days. Whether you are launching your site or redesigning it, a coming soon page can start generating you leads and building your email list before you even launch your site.
There are so many options for designing a beautiful coming soon page, but don’t forget that the page must be actively converting visitors into leads.

Generate Leads with your Coming Soon Page

There are 3 major components to generating leads on your coming soon page:

• Opt-In Newsletter
• Contact Information
• Social Media Integration

Allowing visitors to get in touch with you before you launch is game changing. Imagine bringing in sales before your website goes up. Sounds great right? Well that is exactly why coming soon pages have evolved to where they are now, they add real value to your company and a way for visitor to contact you before your site is even ready to launch. Building a website is not a short venture, and an effective coming soon page leaves an awesome first impression to visitors.

Opt-In Subscription

An opt-in newsletter form allows visitors to receive updates and special offers, and ultimately a chance to contact you for your product or service. The sooner you start collecting emails, the better. The coming soon page should showcase why visitors should sign up for updates. Make it clear the problem you are solving for them in a short description. Make it clear what your company does.
I broke down the components into 3 digestible points so you can ensure that your coming soon page is clear, concise, and ultimately generates leads.

Be sure to collect information and interact with customers.

1. Figure out their needs and suggestions- Your potential customers provide vision to how you can best solve their problem.
2. Learn your primary market- Acquire valuable insight to who exactly is looking for your solution. Keep in mind though, less is more. The longer the form to fill out, the less likely it will get filled out.
3. Convert, convert, convert- Stimulate interest in your early email base. Get them excited about your fresh, new product. Make them want to buy what you are selling.

Build Your Email List Early

1. Validate your product- If you can’t get them to sign up for a newsletter, it’s going to be tough to sell something to them.
2. Find customers- This is not as easy as everyone assumes it is. You need to generate brand awareness as quickly as possible to make sure your product sells the day the website launches.
3. Discover your taglines- This is the perfect time to experiment with your email strategy. Take advantage of this opportunity to discover which phrases and content resonate the best.

Showcase your Subscription Form

1. Make sure your subscription form is easily found- I suggest making the opt-in form the focal point of the page. Visitors are not going to search around for a subscription.
2. Incentivize the visitor- Make it clear that they are going to receive special offers, updates and additional information. Visitors want to know they receive value for giving out their email to you.
3. Avoid outbound links- This page should showcase your company and its mission. Every outbound link is another way a visitor can leave your page.

Engage your Sign Ups

1. Say thank you- After a visitor opts-in, remember to thank them and design a great autoresponse. Customer relations management is paramount, build a positive relationship with the customer and make them want to come back.
2. Encourage more sharing- This can be done in a number of ways, and you can let your creativity shine through. Get people to share through contests, special offers, early access, and anything else you would want if you signed up early to a company.
3. Periodically check in- If you wait too long without contact, your customers will move on to a different solution. Even without your end product, you can still provide information to your subscribers. People like being helped, and will be grateful to you.

Contact Information

How do you expect to get an early jump on the marketplace if visitors can’t contact you? Absent contact information defeats the entire purpose of getting in touch with the market you are trying to tap into.

Although the ideal response you want is an email subscription, not every visitor wants to sign up. If they just have a simple question for you, allow them a platform to contact you on. Direct 1-on-1 contact with a quick response leaves a positive mark. Direct contact humanizes your business, and everyone likes business that feels personable.

Social Media Integration

Integrating Social Media buttons into your coming soon page is circumstantial. If you are active on your company’s social media accounts, then they are an asset and should be included. On the contrary, if your company has little to no following and very little content/activity, then I would advise against social media integration.

Coming Soon Page Design

A coming soon page should have many other components besides the lead-generation aspects. For example, who is going to think your company is profession if your page looks like it was designed in 2005? The overall design of the page should never be overlooked.
A great coming soon page combines all of these elements for the design aspect:

• Page aesthetics
• Countdown timer
• Mission statement
• Responsiveness

Page Aesthetic

To begin, the page aesthetic is the first impression that your company has on a new visitor. The design should be clean, cutting-edge, and minimalistic to accommodate the short attention spans and ease of digestibility.

The appearance of your page represents your brand. What do you want to represent? These are the questions that you should be asking yourself to decide what you want the page to look like.
Make sure your logos and graphics are correctly fitted, sleek, and professional. Site-wide branding carries a heavy role to expanding your company branding awareness.

Countdown Timer

A Countdown Timer is one of the handiest tools on the page. Not only does it make your site more professional, it also adds a passive sense of urgency and is promotional. Visitors want to see your site launch and are curious to see what it looks like as a finished product. Take advantage of the timer, and update your subscribers when website is just about finished. If they subscribed to your updates, then chances are they will be curious to revisit your site.

Mission Statement

Last, a short mission statement should be present on the home page. Your passion should shine through in a concise form. Let visitors know exactly what your company is about, what problem you solve, and any other relevant, interesting information. Make sure that this information is brief and skims easily for a visitor!

Responsiveness

Just because your official site hasn’t launched yet does not mean that your pages should be static, load slowly, and not be optimized for all screen sizes and platforms. Attention to detail is crucial at this early stage in your business. You will bounce visitors if the page doesn’t load quickly, a most likely lose that potential customer forever. In addition, just because this is simply a coming soon page, does not mean that it should not be optimized. There are some truly cutting edge designs that you have to choose from, strive to wow your visitors.

Free coming soon page themes for Bootstrap that are well designed and included the criteria were difficult to come by. Don’t worry about searching for the perfect Theme, we did the research for you.

For paid templates, we only showcase the best templates at the best prices, which typically range from $4 to $25. If you generate one lead before your site launches, you have already made your money back and more. If you would like the theme to be free from webthemez.com, there are a few hoops you have to jump through.

At webthemez.com, you can purchase a theme for $9, or get it for free with a few contingencies. There must be credits in footer, no customer support, no PHP file, and no updates. In addition, if you choose to download for free, you must like and share it on Facebook. If you are fine with that, then you can receive the exact same theme for free.

Best Coming Soon Templates – Free

If you are looking to save some money, a free template is the right choice for you. We gathered three sites that offer free templates, and analyzed our three favorites:

Layla – Best Design

Layla is an awesome, all-around theme for a bootstrap coming soon page. If you’re not in love with the colors, remember that all of the media and settings can be changed to fit your style of website. This theme has many strengths: opt-in email form, countdown timer, a place for a logo, short statement about the company, about section, contact us page, and social media buttons. If that isn’t enough, also keep in mind that the theme is also all on one page, and is already optimized for different screen sizes.

The main drawback of this theme is the sample imaging, so if you wish to use this theme, make sure that you have your own media ready to go that will fit with the themes default settings.

Kite – Most Options

The kite theme is similar to Layla in terms of aesthetic and built-in sections focused on conversion, while also catering to telling the company’s mission and story prior to launch. One very small drawback is that there isn’t space for the mission statement on the home page. It won’t be a problem having it in the about section, although it is nice to have a statement saying what your business is about right on the front page so visitors know that they are in the right place.

On the other hand, this theme has more options for layout and features than Layla in the samples. It comes with 8 color schemes, W3C, HTML,  CSS, countdown timers, AJAX subscribe and contact forms, cross browser support, typography options, as well as having a WordPress version of the software.

Two of the drawbacks of this option is that the opt-in subscription form is not on the home page, and neither is an area for a company mission or statement. Also, there is not a lot of room for text blocks in the about section either if you would like to have anything other than team members.

Countdown

Countdown is the simplest and most minimalist of the coming soon themes. It is clean, professional, and most of all centered on the countdown timer and opt-in subscription.
If you like simple options that minimalize distractions on-page, then Countdown is the theme for you. It includes an opt-in form, countdown timer, social media buttons, and an area for a company statement.

The page lacks an area for a contact page and about section. If you see the amount of information on-page suffice, then don’t hesitate to use this theme for your company.

Best Coming Soon Templates – Paid

For the best of the best that include all of the bells and whistles for less than 10 bucks, look no further. Our favorite three themes that we analyzed all are sure to maximize the bang for your buck. Unfortunately, we dont have a lot of coming soon templates on our marketplace at bootstrapbay (developers, please submit some!) so we looked all over to find a few.

• Dana – Dana
• SeventyTwo – SeventyTwo
• Level UP – Level Up
• Options on BootstrapBay – Coming Soon Pages on Bootstrap Bay

Dana

I love the Dana theme and its uniqueness. Instead of the content continuing as you scroll down, it leads you through their different pages after you click on their interactive buttons that pique curiosity. In addition, the overall aesthetic of the page is immaculate compared to the free themes.

To begin, you can insert HTML5 video and audio into this theme if you so choose. But besides that, the home page features a countdown timer, a short company description, social media links (which are also included on every page in the footer), a menu to choose which page you would like to view, as well as buttons below the countdown timer where you can opt-into their newsletter or go to their next page, the more info section.

The about us section includes both text blocks and icons, in conjunction with the beautiful transition from the home page. After you are done viewing the home section, clicking the next button brings you to the services page. The services page features four dummy services with icons in a carousel. Keep in mind that if you don’t want to view pages in this order, there is a small menu in the top right-hand corner that allows you to view the page you wish. Last, the page includes a contact form for the visitor. This theme has all of the criteria to make a perfect coming soon page for your company.

Even though there are numerous strengths to this theme, I still saw a couple of minor drawbacks. First, the opt-in subscription form isn’t directly on the front page, you have to click on an icon to pull it up. This could minorly decrease overall opt-ins by people clicking past the icon without knowing it was there. Also, the only way to reach the contact form is by accessing it in the menu, the transitions stop after the services page. Although these are minor issues in my opinion, they are still worth mentioning to make you aware of them before you purchase this theme.

SeventyTwo

This theme offers numerous advantages in conjunction with its simple, minimalist look and feel. This theme doesn’t come with tons of bells and whistles, but it has virtually everything you need to make an effective coming soon page for your business if you like the simple layout.
To start, the home page is very clean, showcasing only a logo, short company statement, countdown timer, email opt-in subscription, as well as social media icons. Below the home page is the about section, which comes with both text and graphics. The about section is very simple with no distractions. Below the about section is the Our Team page. If features a carousel of team members with their picture, name, job title, short description, and links to their social media. It is a key benefit if you are looking to showcase the names and faces behind your product! Last up is the contact form. It is very simple and self-explanatory, also with no distractions or excessive graphics like any other section.

The key downfall to this theme is that there isn’t a services page present. Visitors must already know what you do on your page, or you are going to have to skillfully combine it into your about section to get the point across about what you do and why you started your company.

Level UP

You have different layouts to choose from with this theme: a parallax background or a background slider. I personally would choose the parallax background, simply because I like the theme and sliders typically slow down loading speeds for your page. Level UP is a responsive coming soon template that can also double as an under maintenance page as well.
This page is built with a Bootstrap grid section, which makes customization easy. In addition, the theme is available in a WordPress format as well. With that being said, let’s get into the advantages of this theme from a content standpoint. To begin, this theme features a similar homepage to all of the other themes. It includes a logo, text below the logo, a countdown timer, a subscription form and social links on the home page.

Although the main advantage to this page is below the home page. The “What’s Coming” page takes the place of both the services and about page. It features six icons and a short description of each. I love this feature for its simplicity and awesome usage of space. It will save you time by only needing to complete this small section instead of a services and about page, while still getting the point across about what your company is set out to accomplish. I highly recommend that you view this feature to fully understand what I am talking about. Last, below this section is a contact form. Everything in this theme is simple, yet maximizes the minimal space that it requires which increases readability for visitors on your site.

The main downfall of this theme could also be its strength: the about and services sections are absent, while being replaced with a “What’s Coming” section. It is totally a matter of personal opinion, although for user readability sake, I truly thing that the “What’s Coming” section is an excellent replacement.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the decision to have or not have a coming soon page should be clear. Although, choosing the right theme is a matter of weighing price, theme aesthetic and features. We weighed the best 3 free and premium templates for you so you don’t have to, as well as informed you on what goes into a great coming soon page. Now get out there and start converting visitors into leads before you even launch your site.

The post How to Design a Coming Soon Page with Bootstrap appeared first on BootstrapBay.