The Importance of Temporary Landing Pages
Website builds can be lengthy and involved processes. Designers can easily develop tunnel vision focusing on the final build that they forget about the importance of a strong landing page to keep users happy in the meantime. Gone are the days of the terrible-yet-oh-so-nostalgic ‘under construction’ animated GIFS. In their place are mostly functional, boiled-down websites capable of immediately satisfying users’ primary goals.
Why Bother with Landing Pages?
Its easy to understand why web designers overlook temporary landing pages: tight deadlines, the hassle of creating and maintaining a page that will only be discarded later, etc. But there are immediate benefits of exerting that extra effort to develop a great landing page:
You’re Building the Site Already
You’re busy slicing and dicing the static content of your gorgeous future website, so before it gets chucked into a CMS, throw the skeleton up (header, footer, container) as your landing page. Even though the full site is still being developed, site elements can be introduced and built upon later.
While developing the Complete Care Chiropractic website, I introduced what will later become functional elements of the site, but in the interim are simply placeholder divs to frame the temporary content.
Complete Care Chiropractic - the prettiest thing in the world? no. Beneficial? Absolutely.
Also keep in mind that the landing page will not be discarded, but rather dispersed when the full site gets developed. For example, I created a “Make an Appointment” form that will later live on its own page, but in the meantime is readily accessible to any user looking to quickly book an appointment. In fact, every element on the current page will be used elsewhere in the final build. Will it look the same? No. Will it be coded the same? Perhaps. Keep Reading