Under Construction, or Coming Soon

I’ve had more clients that have suggested that we put up an “under construction” notice! I can’t blame them, most of them do not realize that they have not seen a notice like that on a website for at least three years. It is a logical thought – my site isn’t finished, shouldn’t I warn people that I’m in the progress of creating it, that there is more coming?

No. You should not.

Not online, anyway. It isn’t as though someone might forget a hardhad or trip into a hole if they wander around and happen to stumble onto your site. In fact, if you do your job right, they’ll see what you have, and never see a sign of the new stuff until it is there – unless of course you have a sidebar announcement of an impending launch date of a new product line, or similar thing that you want to build up to, and even then, NO “under construction” pages!

Pages like that make you look unprepared. They make you look LESS professional, not more. And they don’t do any good for SEO either. I don’t know that they actually HURT, but I’d bet they do, because a search engine is perfectly able to tell when a page has nothing on it but a huge “coming soon” notice.  So they not only don’t bother indexing the page, it is conceivable that it might affect the indexing frequency or relevance of the rest of your site. It is a potential “influential factor”. They are looking for content rich sites, not space holders.

Whether it hurts SEO or not, it does for certain look bad to your customers, and influences whether they will return or not. If a page is not ready for people, don’t show it.