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Ask HN: Review my startup - DuringConstruction.com

2 points by sfreiberg ↗ HN
Hi HN! I just released the first iteration of a new service that provides nice coming soon pages. The idea is to replace the hideous GoDaddy ad filled pages with something nice looking and useful. I've still got a lot of things I want to do such as additional templates and integration with mass mailers such as MailChimp but I wanted to get feedback from the HN crowd. Here's the main site URL:

http://duringconstruction.com/

And here is an example site:

http://theloserscircle.com/

8 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 33.9 ms ] thread
kin
I think this is a great idea and useful service and I would definitely use it. However, I think the main page could use some redesign. In my opinion, the appearance appears 'dirty'. The example site looks great and has good vibrant color choices but your website doesn't reflect this style. At first I thought the snapshot of your example site was an ad. Maybe want to fix that? Once you have more examples you can have a gallery of them so people can get an idea of what they want and of what you can do. Layout/placement/content seems fine, it's just the color and theme of your website brings me down. I feel like things need to pop. Hope this helps.
sfreiberg
Thanks Kin. I'm sorry my website depresses you. :) But I agree that it needs some work. I'll definitely see what I can do about making the image not look like an ad. Once I get some additional styles integrated I'll put up a gallery and hopefully that will.
fdiotalevi
Hi, a few notes

- generally speaking, I agree that's a useful service. Users should be able to set up not only "coming soon" pages, but also little "corporate websites" the can be online before the designers prepare the final corporate site

- when I log in, if I click on "Account" I see a blank page

- Is it already possible to create a "coming soon" page? I don't see this functionality clearly accessible, I see only the Verification functionality. When I log in, the first thing I want to learn is how easy is to set up my customised landing page.

- Please don't use your Twitter account to send only advertisement. As a Twitter user, I find that very annoying, and usually end up blocking users that do that

sfreiberg
Thanks for the feedback fdiotalevi.

I've fixed the account link. You might need to refresh but it will work correctly now.

All you have to do to create a coming soon page is point the DNS of your site to the duringconstruction.com web server. A site will be automatically created the first time somebody visits the site. To just get one up and running that's all you need to do. After that you can verify the domain and edit the defaults.

I completely agree on the Twitter account. I'm planning on using it for communication with users, but right now there are very few users. :) Naturally I'm hoping that changes and I've only communicated with users so far that have tweeted about buying new domains and they've all been done by hand.

Thanks again for the feedback.

steveklabnik
I can't tell exactly what a Pro account gets me, and how much it is.
sfreiberg
Pro accounts aren't yet ready but they will be $10 per domain for the lifetime of the domain. If this gets abused it may be limited to a year but generally a coming soon site shouldn't be up that long. Currently the planned features for a Pro account are: more styles, no branding and 3rd party mass emailer integration.
steveklabnik
Gotcha. You should make that more prominent.