A page for a launch or an event
A launch page is not something you make once. It is one page in three states, and most of the work is deciding which link sits at the top on any given day.
Before, during, after
A launch page passes through three states, and each one wants a different link at the top. Before, the top link collects people who cannot buy or attend yet: a waiting list, a reminder, a preview. During, it is the thing itself — the order form, the stream, the door. After, it is what a late visitor should do instead: the recording, the next date, the ordinary shop.
This matters because the top link is the only one most visitors read. Changing it takes ten seconds and does more for the launch than any redesign. If you do nothing else on the day, move the right thing to the top.
The date has to be written down, and correct
There is no countdown timer here, and a page that counted down would still need a date typed in by hand. So write it out, in the note line under the top link, in a form that needs no context: Saturday 14 March, 19:00 Kyiv time. Weekday, day, month, hour, time zone.
Two mistakes are common and both are expensive. The first is a date that exists only inside the destination, so the page says "Get tickets" and the visitor has to tap through to learn that it already happened. The second is a time with no zone, which is a different hour for a good part of your audience. Check the date against a calendar, not your memory: you have read that line twenty times and stopped seeing it.
Hide the pre-launch link instead of deleting it
The waiting-list link stops being useful the moment the thing is live, but deleting it throws away wording and an image you will want for the next one. A visibility switch turns a block off without removing it, so the page flips between states in a few taps instead of being rebuilt each time.
The same holds afterwards. A launch page does not end; it goes back to being a page. Turn the launch blocks off, turn the ordinary ones back on, and the address you printed and shared keeps working. What you must not do is leave the live version standing for three months. A finished event at the top tells every visitor that nothing here is maintained.
When the launch deserves its own address
Sometimes the launch has a name of its own, and then it earns a page of its own. A second address is easier to say out loud and to print on a poster, and its QR code points at the event rather than at you. It also separates the statistics, so the traffic the launch brought is visible by itself instead of mixed into your usual numbers.
An account holds up to ten pages, so this costs nothing but the setup. The trade is upkeep: a second page is a second thing to keep current, and an event page abandoned after the event is worse than no event page at all. Decide in advance what it becomes afterwards, or decide not to make it.
The day before
Do this the evening before, not an hour before, and do it on a phone.
- Open the page on your own phone with Wi-Fi turned off. Cellular data is what most people use, and it is the slower case.
- Tap every link, including ones you have not touched this week and assume are fine.
- Read the date off the page out loud. Weekday, day, month, hour, zone.
- Confirm that the top link is the one you want tapped tomorrow, not the one that was right last week.
- Hide the blocks that stop being true the moment it starts, so the change is one switch, not five edits.
- Look at the page in a dark room and in daylight. A darkened background image can swallow small text in either.
- Send the address to yourself in the app you will be posting from, and open it from inside that app.
Anything you find at this point takes a minute to fix. The same fault found while people are arriving costs you the launch, because someone who tapped a broken link does not come back to check whether you repaired it.