The big mistake of avoiding the teasing or coming soon pages for your hotel before launching a website.
Have you decided to improve your business by launching a website for your hotel? Are you in the middle of a rebranding process? Do you have a domain but your website is not ready to be published?
Sometimes people are so focused on working on the web-building that they forget that some users will check the website address and won’t find anything.
I bet you know how exasperating it is to go check some information and find an empty white page, or a page with only the system’s logo or just the overused gif of a builder man saying “Page under construction”. Most of the user will never check your website again after that experience and you will be losing a client.
We propose some ways to avoid that situation, depending on you budget and/or the time you want to spend on it.
Redirect to another profile / website.
Maybe you want to spend zero time on the teaser page and you just need something for a short period time. So, how about redirecting your website (via robots.txt) to the Linkedin or Facebook profile of your enterprise?
Your enterprise doesn’t have a profile in Linkedin yet? What are you waiting for?
How to redirect your page:
Edit your robots.txt on your server:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourdomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/temporarypage\.com\/" [R=302,L]
Remember to change “yourdomain” and “temporarypage” 😉
Using external services.
If you don’t want to spend too much time on designing your “launching soon” page, you have no idea about PHP and coding and also you want to do it for free or a really reasonable price, you should check launchrock and kickofflabs.
We were down for a couple of days changing the server and updating the website and we couldn’t spend more than a few minutes setting up our temporary page, so we decided to do it with launchrock… and look at the result!
Designing and coding the page.
If you work with an agency that can create the temporary page (if they don’t, just change your agency now!). We just want to share some ideas about how a “coming soon” page should be and what should it have:
- Has to talk about you and the currently situation. People should understand what’s going on and what your products are. You don’t need to write a long explanation, just clear enough to don’t get your users lost.
- Do you have a PDF with your rates? Great! Create a link where people can check it. Giving 0 information is the easiest way to lose bookings.
- Show your contact info or add a contact form. Most of the people are going to your site to find some information about your hotel: if there’s nothing in there, give them at least an easy option to contact you for asking. Don’t push them to other hotels websites.
- Do you have good pictures of your hotel?- use one! (Make people want to be there) Don’t have any yet?- use your logo! (Spread your brand) -and forget those horribles un-personal gifs.
- If you have planned to keep your costumers updated by newsletters (you should) It could be a good idea to start collecting email addresses, so… add a newsletter form!
- Don’t forget about “viral-marketing”: give the option to share it on Facebook, Twitter, email…
You can check here two examples we did with our clients.
