Downtime is one of those things that we all fear. Some of us have more reason to fear it than others though. A shabby downtime page can lose you valuable traffic.
A few hours ago I decided to check in on a promising new blog I discovered recently. I wanted to see how it was doing and the new content.
That is, until I read the homepage:
"We’ll be back very soon. Please hang in there."
That was the entire contents of the page.
Inevitably, someone will wind up on an error page on your website. It has to happen. It just wouldn’t be the internet if everything worked out perfectly. So, how are you going to prepare for these visitors?
This article isn’t a guide to how to create custom 404 errors pages. It’s very easy to do, just Google for it and you’ll find a million results like this one.
Your reader has just been landed in a dead end. They’re annoyed and aggravated at the loss of their time, not to mention the fact that they now have to resume their search for whatever information they were after in the first place. What better way is there to cheer them up than to make a joke?
My favourite example of this is at Lizzdmc Productions, where the 404 page offers a psychiatric analysis before advising you on what to do next. This is also the approach I have tried to take with Pro Blog Design, where you’ll find I modified a popular parody of The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe.
Work With Us. Psst... we build awesome websites. Click here to see what I mean.
12th July 2011
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