

Ask HN: Review my startup - DuringConstruction.com - sfreiberg

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:<p>http://duringconstruction.com/<p>And here is an example site:<p>http://theloserscircle.com/
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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.

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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.

------
sfreiberg
Clickable links:

<http://duringconstruction.com/> <http://theloserscircle.com/>

------
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.

