Terracotta coming soon page template
Clay and burnt sienna. The palette of a room with wooden tables.
Restaurants, cafés, wine bars, bakeries. Written for the case where the owner is doing the build-out and the marketing in the same week, which is why the copy is a list of facts you already know rather than a brand story you have to invent.
The .zip is HTML, CSS and JS in one file, MIT licensed. No account, no email, no modal — the download starts when you click. Hosting it here instead takes a free account: 3 pages and 100 leads, no card.
Twelve tables, one room, opening in five weeks
Small kitchen, short menu, no reservations after eight. Rue Saint-James, Bordeaux.
Live render — the countdown is really counting. Open the demo for the full-size page.
Make it yours before you download it
Every free coming soon template on the web hands you a .zip and wishes you luck with a text editor. Your first hour goes on finding the hex value that appears eleven times, the date format the timer wants, and which <p> is the subheadline. Change it here instead. The .zip you get is the page in the panel — your words, your colours, your date, already in the file.
Still no account, still MIT. Editing this costs us nothing, so we do not charge for it or hide it behind a signup — the thing worth paying for is hosting it and collecting the addresses, and you can decide that after you have the file.
The three colours
Baked in as LAUNCH_DATE, midnight local. The hour goes in the same line if you need one.
Your text on your background
12.61:1 AAA
White label on your button
7.31:1 AAA
No account, no email, no modal. Your values ride in the query string of that link because the .zip is built on our side — that route has no database and no session, it writes three files into the response and forgets them. Nothing here is saved, so bookmark the link if you want your version back.
Twelve tables, one room, opening in five weeks
Small kitchen, short menu, no reservations after eight. Rue Saint-James, Bordeaux.
This is the file, not a mockup of it — same three CSS variables, same countdown maths.
What Terracotta is made of
| Background | #F5EDE4 |
|---|---|
| Text | #3B2314 |
| Accent | #9A3412 |
| Typeface | Montserrat |
| Countdown | On, demo set to 35 days out |
| Good for | Restaurant / café, Shop / drop, Event |
| Download | coming-soon-terracotta.zip — index.html + README + LICENSE. MIT. |
| Included | Hosting, subdomain, working email capture, leads list (100 leads on Free) |
Why these three colours
#F5EDE4 and #3B2314 are clay and wet earth — the same pairing you get in a room with terracotta floors and dark wood. 12.61:1, comfortable rather than harsh. The burnt sienna #9A3412 is the highest-contrast accent here at 7.31:1 with white button text, which is deliberate: a small business page should never fail an accessibility check because of a design flourish.
The copy it ships with
"No reservations after eight" is the sort of constraint most people would hide. Put it on the page. It tells your future customers exactly what kind of room this is, and the people it filters out were never going to be happy anyway.
All four fields are editable. The demo copy is a starting point, not a placeholder — it is written to be replaced, not shipped.
Contrast, measured
Both numbers are computed from the hex values above using the WCAG 2.1 relative-luminance formula, every time this page renders. Nothing here is typed in by hand.
Text on background
12.61:1
Passes AAA
White label on the button
7.31:1
Passes AAA
Both figures clear WCAG AA as shipped. That was a constraint when this palette was picked, not a happy accident — the accent was darkened until the button label passed.
What is in coming-soon-terracotta.zip
Three files, no build step, no npm install, no tracker. Unzip it, double-click index.html, and the page is there — countdown running, font loading, form styled.
coming-soon-terracotta/
├── index.html the whole page — inline CSS, inline JS, one file
├── README.md the three ways to make the email field work
└── LICENSE MIT The three colours are CSS variables in a :root block at the top of index.html. Change those four lines and the whole page follows — there is no other colour value in the file. Or set them further up this page and they arrive already in it.
The catch, which we would rather you read here
In this .zip, and in every free coming soon template you can download anywhere, the email field goes nowhere. The gallery listing promises "countdown + email signup form". The file ships action="#". You find out about four days after you posted the link, when you go looking for the addresses and there are none, and the ones you missed are not recoverable.
It is not laziness on anyone's part. A static HTML file has nowhere to put an address until you give it somewhere — that is genuinely your decision, not the template author's. But saying so in a FAQ entry after the download, or not at all, is a choice. So: the README opens with this, and it gives you all three options with the code.
Formspree
Free tier, 50 submissions a month, works from a static file. Paste one URL into index.html. Nothing to do with us, and the fastest way to a form that works.
Mailchimp, ConvertKit or Buttondown
Swap the <form> for their embed and delete the fetch block. The README has the markup with this template's classes already on it.
Post to a page you publish here
Publish Terracotta on the free plan, then point the downloaded file at /api/leads/subscribe with your page slug. Two lines. Addresses land in the same leads list, and you keep hosting the HTML wherever you like — Netlify, your own FTP, anywhere.
Whichever you pick, submit the form with your own address and go and look for it before you tell anyone the page exists. Thirty seconds, and it is the only step in that file that can quietly cost you a launch.
The first three things to change
- 1
Replace the street with your street. A physical business page without an address is a poster for a room nobody can find.
- 2
Keep the constraint sentence and make it yours: cash only, no bookings, ten covers, closed Mondays. That line does the positioning.
- 3
Set the countdown to the week you open, not the day. Build-outs slip, and a countdown that hits zero on a closed door is worse than no countdown.
Put Terracotta online
Your headline, your date, your accent colour. Live on a real URL with a working email field, and the addresses land in a list you can export.
Free plan: 3 pages, 100 leads, no card. The .zip needs neither.