website under construction 2023

[engine]

It's 2023 and I found an under construction message on a website!

Really, yes, really!

[Marshall]

I saw one the other day as well. Said "Under construction, please come back in two weeks."

[engine]

Odd, eh.
Back in the day it was understandable, and there was something exciting about it. Nowadays, it's quite poor.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

As long as the page(s) return a 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) to tell search crawlers that the downtime is temporary, an under construction message is fine. It's in the Google guidelines, which also say don't block the crawlers or issue a 200 or 404 for 'under construction'.

Ideally, you would show some content, of course, but if you can't yet... 503.

[lucy24]

It's 2023 and I found an under construction message on a website!

Was it the front page, accompanying a 200 response, or was it the site's custom 503 page? And if the former, what are you supposed to do when you've registered a domain and done the DNS but haven't actually made the pages yet?

:: detour to check files, because who remembers all your own error documents ::

At least one of my sites has a 503 page that says

This area is currently closed for repairs, renovation or remodeling. Please check back in a few hours.

If time has gone by and you’re still getting this message, the usual fixes are to refresh the window, empty your browser cache, or restart the browser--in that order. If none of these is any help, there may be a problem. Contact the {link}webmaster{/link} to find out what’s going on.

I don't know how this compares to what others have. And admittedly it does say “a few hours”, not “a year or two”.

[engine]

This is the home page of the site. I can't understand why they either didn't leave the old site up while the new site is developed, or just put that on the changed pages.

Wayback machines indicates the site was running in 2021, and has been a 403 Forbidden starting from late August 2021 until December 2022 - wow. I guess the Under Construction is now better than 403.

[lucy24]

has been a 403 Forbidden starting from late August 2021 until December 2022 - wow.

But remember, that's not necessarily the general-public response. All the Wayback Machine can report is what its own robot receives.

[mack]

Would be interesting to look the site up on archive.org... it might have been under construction since 1995 lol

edit: Just noted you have already done that :-)

Mack.

[tangor]

There's always the time honored KNOWN aspect of procrastination. :)

Or, "I'll get to it when I get to it!"

Or, "Well, second thoughts, I'll be back..."

[mack]

"Coming soon" is the new "Under Construction"... Thats my excuse and I'm sticking to it :-)

Mack.

[blend27]

@lucy24, @All, how about this one?

with 206!

At the moment Service is not available. It is thinking what it thinks You are thinking..

Hi, I am Service!

<image of Rudolf jumping rope>(no, not that one, this is not a political statement, just partial content with http status code (u guessed it, wrong))

But soon Service may be available!

... Simply put, 'no availability' is the proportion of time Service(me) is willingly not in a functioning condition. Oy!