Applies to: Everyone
Error pages, not something we spend a lot of time thinking about. But they can be quite interesting. This came to mind because this website went offline this morning and had a horrible error page. But some error pages are really interesting!

What happened this morning?

This morning for 22 minutes and 1 second this website was offline.

I honestly don’t know what happened, these things occur from time to time and if you came to the site during the problem you would have seen a horrible message saying “Database Connection Not Found” or something.

I have now changed the error page so it should say something a little more friendly and include our email address.

Fun Error Pages

Many websites have fun error messages for when their website goes offline!

There is the famous Twitter Fail Whale 

Read more about the history of this here.

YouTube’s unhappy face

 

Google Chrome “No Internet Connection” Game

Press spacebar (or tap the screen) to play the game if you see the dinosaur

Some are interactive, this one asks you to type in words

https://nclud.com/sdfsdf

Or a confused horse

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/404

Want more?!

Check out these 24 ‘fun’ error page designs

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33766/10-clever-website-error-messages-from-creative-companies.aspx#sm.0001w93y9x4e0crwz261rzkwtnose

I love Number 8, personally.

Sadly our error pages look a bit boring!

404 error version 1 (this shows when something is very wrong)

404 error version 2 (this shows when something is wrong but the site is still working, it would be nice if it said “Error” on the page)

500 error (this is shown when something is very very wrong, like what happened today)

So there we are!  If you’ve got any questions just let me know.
Happy error page hunting!
Mike 🙂
PS I can confirm, the gov.uk website has a very boring, but helpful error page https://www.gov.uk/errororr