Love this "coming soon" page | Hacker News Reader

Love this "coming soon" page

ispecimen.com

27 pointsfnazeeri24 comments

Comment bait? If you want to make this coming soon page useful, then insert a clear call-to-action that has purpose. In other words, now that you've got us all going to your lovely page, why not make good use of our time and request that we give you our details if we're interested in your startup...but that would involve you telling us more about your startup.

Have a look at these for some inspiration: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/14/design-a-successfu...

I dunno, the page seems pretty derivative to me.

Certainly not an integral part of the 404 process?

The image on the "coming soon" page is hotlinked from another site. Also there are some interesting comments on the CSS that would lead me to believe that the programmer is maybe fairly new at this, and still feeling the need to heavily document the reason behind simple CSS rules.

No kidding:

  <title>Untitled Document</title>

Guilty as charged! We're a bunch of MD/PhDs... Help! How would you perfect this file?

Insert the name of your company/organization in-between the <title> tags and ditch the "Untitled Document." Don't sweat the comments in the CSS because those will shed with experience.

Change the big centered image from a .png to a .jpg. Try to get it down to around 30 to 60kb. Right now it's over 600kb, which is pretty big for a design element. As a general note you'll also want to add more text to the page and utilize your header tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) when constructing a full layout. That will make sure you've got something for the search engines to nab onto.

Oy, JPG is a shit choice for anything with graphics or text (as does this) — perhaps just the earth as JPG would work, or simply compressing the PNG a bit more (reduce the palette).

First pass, (the obvious stuff): 1. always view the source before posting 2. remove the basic css comments, or ... if the new coders need them, run them through a script that strips them out before copying the files to your web server 3. Might as well give the page a title, so it doesn't come up as "Untitled Document" ...

Hire someone to do it..

Cut down on the image size. Granted, I'm currently in Malaysia on holiday (which explains the bad Internet speeds), but the image is taking an incredibly long time to load. You might want to open Photoshop and adjust the number of colours in the image, amongst other things.

Nah, just save as jpg, not png. That normally leads to ugly artifacts with text but since this text is white on black you don’t get them (unless you pick a really low quality). Gets you a nicer looking earth and probably a even smaller file.

MD/PhDs doing a startup?! You should be on HackerMed.com!

It's not hot linking (in the "using someone else's hosting" context): both http://fnazeeri.apollohosting.com/ and http://ispecimen.com/ resolve to the same IP (66.96.146.110). Likely just added the domain, and the image is hard linked to the original.

Could someone explain it to me?

It's a Coming Soon Page! How complicated could it be!

clicks

Umm ... yeah... Could someone explain it to me too?

Deriving the world? Differentiating the planet?

d/dt is the standard mathematical representation for rate of change.

My guess was "Change the world", and judging by the alt text for the image, I was close: "Changing the world".

It's kinda neat.

Wouldn't it be "the rate at which our world is changing", or something similar?

Maybe I'm too literal-minded.

Let's pray that d(world)/dt > 0.

I guess it's highly multidimensional, so you cannot really compare it to a real number.

But assuming that it is normed, you can say |d(world)/dt| > 0.

Or at least you can say d(world)/dt ≠ 0.

And I guess you are right there.

Or maybe, if the norm is something like "goodness", we hopefully can say d(|world|)/dt > 0.

If it's constant at least we don't have to worry about 2012.

It's a mathematical idiom common in calculus. For example dx/dt is usually read as "change in x over time".

d stands for delta, which means difference or change.

.. so you'd read that page roughly as "change in world over time".

It's not worse than lisping the world: http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2003/index.html

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