For a while, one of the most common statements on the World Wide Web was that the page you were looking at was not finished yet.
Visit Jef Poskanzer’s Under Construction page
Jef Poskanzer turned that cliché into a page of its own at ACME Labs in August 1996.
The idea was simple: collect examples of the little signs, workers, barricades, animated GIFs, and warnings people used to announce that a website was still being built.
In other words, document a design habit while it was still happening everywhere.
The phrase became infrastructure
A surviving quotation from the page records Poskanzer checking how many pages contained the phrase “under construction.”
Using AltaVista, he noted roughly 400,000 results in August 1996 and about a million by December of that year. The count kept climbing into the millions as the web expanded.
The numbers are less important than the instinct to count them.
Most early-web decoration was treated as disposable. Poskanzer noticed that a small visual joke had become a recognizable language of the web and started preserving examples.
ACME Labs itself gives the page additional context. Poskanzer’s update archive records his first web page in July 1994, the launch of acme.com in November 1995, the Under Construction collection in August 1996, and a long chain of software releases and small web tools afterward.
That continuity makes ACME feel less like an old website than an old workshop that simply never closed.
The Under Construction page is funny now because the phrase eventually became unnecessary. Modern publishing systems let unfinished work stay private until launch. Hosted platforms supply polished maintenance pages automatically. The hand-picked animated construction worker largely vanished.
But in the 1990s, unfinishedness was often public.
People built pages directly on the live web, apologized for missing sections, and asked visitors to come back later.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes artifacts like this because web history is not only browsers, protocols, and companies.
Sometimes it is a million tiny GIFs saying the place is not ready yet.