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If your site or program fails, it’s common courtesy not to leave your audience hanging. Acknowledge the problem. Offer an intelligible and honest explanation for the error; provide options to resolve the problem. In programming, this is known as failing gracefully. (A little humor doesn’t hurt, either)

A popular example of graceful failure is Twitter’s out-of-service page, colloquially known as the ‘Fail Whale’:

Twitter users see this image all too often, so it’s a good thing it’s such a clever piece.

Another type of failure is the 404 page, which a website serves up when it can’t find an undefined or missing URL. It used to be an Easter Egg to design funny or philosophical 404’s, but in researching this post, I found that either I didn’t like most of the ones I found or the links I had for supposedly good ones were out of date. Perhaps it’s gone out of style?

I did find one that made me chuckle:

And with that, we take our bow for the week. Thanks for joining us.

PS: If you’re interested, Jeff Atwood has the whole 404 best-practices angle covered.