I’m beginning to see these new “work in progress” avatar communities just about every where now in day. A rough estimation of about 4 avatar communities have been publicly under development for over 6 months now, and to be honest I find it ridiculous.
Don’t get me wrong, a splash page is great for building a small audience so that when the project is actually released it can have some life to kick-start, but only for so long. Really, anyone who’s been in the basement planning for over 6 months is usually planning wrong things from the get-go. They don’t have a live site or a live audience to really see what the users want, they just kind of guess what the users want by looking at their competitors. Someone who’s been behind the scenes for over 6 months can get away with not working for a week or 2, no one will really notice. On a live site, the story changes. You have real people giving you what they really want, and if they don’t get it they’ll make it clear just how much they really want it. People will notice if your slacking off, they catch on by the lack of updates and activity.
So please, if you have been planning to open an online project. Give it a month or two to really let it sink in. If it doesn’t still seem like a good idea then, don’t put up a splash page saying it’s going to be released soon to then disappoint them with the quality.