Not ready, but indexed by Yahoo - what should I do?

[stephenmunday]

I was wondering if any of you emarketing brains out there could help me out here:

My company is developing a new ecommerce site based around the premise of having customers' names translated into Japanese and using them to personalize products. On the homepage of the site, we have a feature that allows customers to input their first and last names and then see what these are in Japanese katakana characters.

While the site is still under development, we put this homepage and with the name change feature up under the real domain name for testing. We forgot to add a file to exclude robots, but I figured it didn't matter as I couldn't see how they would find it anyway.

Well, to cut a long story short, Slurp (Yahoo's spider) did manage to find it and indexed it. Our keywords are not in a very competitive area, so even without any links to speak of or much content, we are already ranking fairly well for a number of our target keyphrases. As a result of which, we are now getting around 20 visitors a day.

I know - usually you want your site to get indexed as quickly as possible. What has concerned me is that we only have that one page up at the moment and, even though the name translation function is working well, the rest of the site content is inaccessible to visitors and so maybe they are getting a negative impression.

I am wondering what to do to make the best of this situation (given that the site is not going to be complete for at least several weeks). One thing I have done is to add a mailing list sign-up (using bravenet code) so that people who are interested in our site can sign up to be notified when it is complete.

Does anyone else have any other ideas?

(Here is the site URL: www.japanese-name-translation.com . I figure it's out there already, so feel free to have a look if you want.)

[Dean Phillips]

Hello:

People can be pretty understanding and forgiving, if you're honest with them. I would just add a small blurb to your homepage apologizing for the fact that your site isn't completed yet. Offer to contact them when your website is completed. Since your visitors are currently being inconvenienced, by arriving at a website still under construction; tell them you you will give them "priority" notification when your site is completed. Priority sounds better and will make your visitors feel special.

[stephenmunday]

Hi Dean

I actually did what you suggested on the basis of advice some people gave me in another forum. I also added an incentive for sign-up and I am seeing a 2% conversion rate on this now. This is not only giving me some good leads, but is also giving me reason to hope about the potential performance of my site in the future.