Pointless Redesign Holding Pages

I was doing some searching on the web just now and came across a web designer's website, which was busy putting up a new site. The irony was that it was to create a new design to show how well they had “grown up”. It can sometimes be appropriate to use such a holding page over a few hour period when you upload or apply a new website or changes, to prevent visitors from seeing errors relating to the changes…but during the creation phase, I think it’s pointless!

Not only does it mean that website about them is limited to an email address and a phone number, but it also shows a lack of professionalism. When I see those sort of holding pages I imagine the owner of the website thinking to themselves “our website’s not very good, quick put up a “under going redesign” page while we make something better.

We recently took over the development of a website with a large amount of content, and had the joyous job of scraping content from static pages in to Toucan CMS™. The website’s owners wanted to be able to edit their own content, and due to the way the previous website functioned, this was not an easy task for them, so we rebuilt the code from scratch and give it a new design. Due to the size of the site, if we had done this it would have been offline for weeks. Instead, we worked on it in the background (out of sight from visitors), moved all of the essential content across, applied our new website design, and then slowly moved non-essential content over (although the non-essential content was still available).

I therefore pose a question: ‘why’? Why do businesses put up pointless “we are making a new website, back soon” pages?

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