Nobody likes it when their site goes down. Not the web site owner and certainly not the visitors to the site. Especially if the site is a large part of their daily routine.
If my little blog is down it’s not going to ruin anyone’s day but mine, but I saw an error screen tonight that reminded me how important it is to customize the error pages on your web site. I notice these things, since I do web sites for clients from time to time (and yes, I do tell them up front that I am not a designer–as you can tell from my little homemade template). Or maybe I just notice because when a favourite site of mine goes down I tend to hit refresh obsessively.
As a visitor I appreciate it when someone goes to the trouble to inject some humour into the very frustrating situation of a website I rely on being down. If you’ve ever taken a really close look at the “site offline” screen that is displayed when LibraryThing is down you’ll have noticed a picture of a stack of books. Look closer and you’ll see that the titles of the books in the stack have been carefully chosen to reflect the site being down and user (as well as administrator) frustration at that fact.
Tonight I came across another creative “site offline” screen. I was refreshing my Blip.fm account because the site has been down for maintenance for several hours. Instead of the standard message (which was already customized and branded), the screen went black after a moment and displayed a boot up screen like you would see on a PC. The screen wasn’t static though, information was added at intervals as if it really was a computer booting up. Looking more closely, it was clearly a little gift to anyone frustrated enough to click refresh more than a few times. Here is a screen capture for your enjoyment (didn’t manage to get a vid):
Did anyone else see this? I wonder if it changes depending on what kind of computer you have since it clearly identifies your computer and browser.
Know of any other sites that have gone to the trouble of entertaining their visitors even when the site goes down? Let me know in the comments.
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The Twitter fail whale is another great example. I’m actually a little disappointed that Twitter has become more stable — I miss the cute little whale.
I noticed that Twitter has redone all of their graphic design. It’s much more slick and shiny now … I miss the previous designer’s style. I suspect the failwhale has been redone.
If you miss the old one, you can always see it on the designer’s site.