I have around 50 domains without any paid hosting as I got an issue with Host Gator and most of them are neither active nor parked anywhere. Whenever, I will buy web hosting again then would make all my domains active and live with different projects in mind but till that time it is a wise idea to create a coming soon page for them. There are many plugins available for a Wordpress installation to create a launch page but for people like me who do not have any hosting then LaunchRock is the best free service available.
I got to know about them via Name.com somewhere in my control panel and then few months back I got time to create a free landing page for one of my domain by exploring the service provided by LaunchRock. You need to perform a series of simple steps to create a perfect launch page for your domain and I am gradually creating one for all of my non-active domains. Lets see the Step-by-Step guide to launch your coming soon page for free.
Login to your LaunchRock account and at then select a theme from the available ones at the left hand side as shown below. For another project select the option Create New Project at the top under My Projects drop down menu:
Once the theme is selected, upload an image in the specified format to be the favicon of your webpage. If the image is not in the recommended format then it will automatically resize it as per the need, so you don't have to worry about that.
Scroll down the option pane and as per the requirements, fill up the blank spaces for your coming soon page. Please refer the options listed below for the coming soon page that I created for a project and then you can refer the equivalent text as displayed on the live site @ www.doctorsgalaxy.org.
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Announcement Bar ---- Coming Damn Soon
Project Name ---- Doctors Galaxy or you can replace the name with a custom logo of your choice
Tagline ---- Absolutely free crosscheck of your treatment, the way you should be treated in any hospital.
Description ---- Would be described itself upon launch
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Box Opacity & Alignment can be changed as per your wish along with the colors for everything as per your choice. You can upload a background image as I did for my page or let it be blank but I would recommend you to upload an image (You can see the crystal fruit image which I uploaded as a background image for the project). You can also collect extra information from your sign ups though I would recommend to skip it in a coming soon page.
Once you see a green check next to the Landing Page section then please move to the next section to complete your page launch. In the next section, you can also add sharing options to your launch page as mentioned below so that you can crosscheck the options set by me in the launch page:
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Incentive Content ---- Share about us with the world so that everyone can get the benefit for free.
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You can turn on the Share by email option and can set the email subject and message the way you want it to be delivered. I am sure, you would also like to turn on the Facebook Like, Send and Twitter Share options. Similarly, you can turn on the sharing options for other social sharing sites.
After that move down to the Email Confirmation section where you need to fill up the columns the way you write an email. Then finally to Domain settings where you need to enter the URL, anything other than www.yourdomainname.com like I created www4.doctorsgalaxy.org as shown below:
You need to create a CNAME entry for the subdomain in your DNS which points to host.launchrock.com and it could be anything like www4 though I could not understand why they restrict to use www. When all the sections are there with a green check box then simply click the Launch Site button to make your project live on the web as shown below. Optionally, you can also go to Advanced Settings to fill up Project Tags and to set up Google Analytics ID
Once lauched, you would see the successfully lauched message and then your project would be live over the web though at times it might take 72 hours. You may need to redirect your base-domain to your new landing page.
Gradually, I would be creating a free coming soon page for all my owned domains so that visitors can get an idea about the coming project and with the help of LaunchRock, you can also do the same. At this point of time, I am not aware of any site offering better service than this. Are you aware of any free service providing the similar functionality then do let us know.