This is why nobody should have "under construction" pictures on their page.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gk/atwork/

It's amazing what you come across when you finally unglue yourself from your own websites long enough to remember the old days of "surfing the net!"

...  this goes without saying ... 

lol i remember the first personal site i knocked up, construction gifs, email / inbox / spinning @ style contact me buttons, it was so bad i'm pleased that hard drive has been destroyed and grateful it doesn't appear in the internet archive.

it amazes me that sites / people still use this style online. it's just a bit 1998 to me.

one thing i am guilty of like this though, and i need to sort it when i find time, is statements like "The service goes live in October '06" - ouch. I saw something recently that said going live in May 2005. that's even worse than under construction animations!

Guilty of the 'launch date' syndrome - I was pushed into it and had to update the date very week. it went from

Summer 06
October 1st 2006
Mid October
late october
7th November

then we launched.

I have some red writing that says 'Under Development' on my new site. I don't expect anyone to find it until I'm ready for it, but if they do - they can expect it not to work fully!

The bits hat do work, work bloody brilliantly!

IMO there is no excuse for using UC

If you are working on a a new page...don't add it until its ready

if you are redoing a page...remove it from the menu bar until its ready...or don;t update it till its ready

if your whole site is UC then don't make it live until its ready (or enough is to provide some value)

I'd rather people not find site until it's complete....because i see it, visitors who come across a UC site are likely to never return

PS. I've fallen into the "launch date spiral o'death" recently as well....

Site will be live....
Sept 06
Oct 06
Nov 06
"Whenever the heck i feel like it...."

ha ha ha - my site is "Under Construction" 100% of the time, I just don't advertise it

I did the launch date back in March but I used the line -

"If you somehow ended up here this site should be ready in a month! This kept it open  to change without having to change it.

I let it slide because I wasn't really concerned about getting that site running just yet so finally last month I went to Wikipedia and scraped a bunch of info and just plopped it on page 2 so I could get the line off the page.

I'll finish it next month....

Nic wrote:

....because i see it, visitors who come across a UC site are likely to never return

I always get a kick out of it when folks say that. Because of this, that, or the other thing, they're "never going back" to a certain site.

I must visit a hundred web sites a day.

365 days a year.

You do the math.

I can't remember what I had for dinner last Tuesday, let alone remember which sites I have vowed "never to go back to"!  Oh yeah, sure... Ha!

Plus, most web sites evolve. They either get better, or they get worse, but very few stay the same. Swearing to yourself that you'll never return to a site could be a mistake.

I hope to heaven that those who saw my early attempts at building a site have forgotten the misery I caused them. And, if they have banned me for life,.... screw `em. This is a big, big internet world. Gettin' bigger every day.

you're are partly right CJ

I look at a lot of sites and forget most

if I run across a site that has an UC page on it I’m not going to write it down on my "sites to run a personal vendetta against” list and spend the rest of my days attacking them vigorously with “Nice site losers” emails (altough that does give me an idea...hold-on 1 sec... I have some emails to write.... jk )

I'm back...Anyways, instead I’ll move on to the next result. And since I do make a lot of similar searches I tend to recognize good/bad sites pretty quickly (1 UC page isn’t enough to deter me, but many will)

So the next time I want to check out a site on a similar topic it’s not that I say to myself "I’ll never go to that UC site again" but rather that I’ll remember the URL of the site I like or subconsciously will bypass the ones I didn't enjoy

How many times have you clicked on a search result you didn’t recognize only to see a site you have been to before and didn’t like? (or does that only happen to me?)Do you exit right away or do you give that site a second chance?

In my case I hardly give second chances (I swear I’m a nice guy really ) so what I meant to say with my previous post was that instead of taking that chance, why not wait a bit and make sure you’re site is complete enough to really benefit your visitors?

Nic wrote:

I look at a lot of sites and forget most

if I run across a site that has an UC page on it I’m not going to write it down on my "sites to run a personal vendetta against” list and spend the rest of my days attacking them vigorously with “Nice site losers” emails (altough that does give me an idea...hold-on 1 sec... I have some emails to write.... jk )

You better not forget my web site though! Ha ha ha ha...

Nic wrote:

So the next time I want to check out a site on a similar topic it’s not that I say to myself "I’ll never go to that UC site again" but rather that I’ll remember the URL of the site I like or subconsciously will bypass the ones I didn't enjoy

How many times have you clicked on a search result you didn’t recognize only to see a site you have been to before and didn’t like? (or does that only happen to me?)Do you exit right away or do you give that site a second chance? )

Point well taken. Answer: I exit.

OK, now I see the light.

You better not forget my web site though! Ha ha ha ha...

haha....don't worry...as soon as I finish sending TA all these emails i'll get to it.... (just kidding Skip )

but what if unscrupulous web hosts put it on before you have learnt to take it off our host did that with gwema when i just started... yes it had the little man with the spade and pile o dirt but i didnt know how to change it so i put up the beta version of my site... it was cruddy.. but informative, so the links may not have worked and the pages mildy off center... to the far right, but you cant win em all.

Ryan_steyn wrote:

but what if unscrupulous web hosts put it on before you have learnt to take it off our host did that with gwema when i just started... yes it had the little man with the spade and pile o dirt but i didnt know how to change it so i put up the beta version of my site... it was cruddy.. but informative, so the links may not have worked and the pages mildy off center... to the far right, but you cant win em all.

I hate the 'website not configured' messagethat a host puts up.

On our old server we used cpanel. appartently cpanel is easy to break and keeps getting hacked into. On some occasions a setting in the server wouls brak and they'd stop showing our site and put up a big green page saying 'website not configured, hosting by cpanel.....'

we switched servers for this among other reasons

Sorry people but i had to show you this...

This site is supposed to be under construction since 1990, and you know what? It really is.

The sad part is that they even make websites for a living. This is like the ultimate record in under construction.

Moron
Dont wont to credit him with SEO.

Konkurencija wrote:

Sorry people but i had to show you this...

This site is supposed to be under construction since 1990, and you know what? It really is.

The sad part is that they even make websites for a living. This is like the ultimate record in under construction.

Moron
Dont wont to credit him with SEO.

is this for real???

hmm... reminds me a saying i once heard... procrastination is like masturbation, seems like a good idea at the time but in the end all your doing is f####ng yourself

soulripper wrote:

is this for real???

it's HTML 4.01 transitional and makes a call to a CSS file

it certainly wasn't last updated 1990!

obviously... nobody maintains a site like that one for 16 years...

http://teddybeargarden.tripod.com/id5.html
Better?

LOL Want my list of excuses instead?

I see the link to the css, but it doesn't appear that the css file even exists.  They even use several proprietary attributes that would be better done in css.