Something’s gone horr… oh, hang on…
I headed back to A List Apart this afternoon to have another look at the examples from that Fluid Grids article. Except the URL got mucked up somehow and I ended up at the ALA 404 error page. Most of the 404s I’ve seen pull you straight out of the front-end of site and into the back-end code. Error, buzz, beep, string of unintelligible characters if you are really lucky. But not in this case.
Something has gone wrong but what you get are a couple of reasons why you are maybe where you are, a reassurance that this isn’t just some unnoticed hole in the site and a couple of sensible exit strategies. And an illustration. An error page watercolour.
It’s great. Not too serious, but also not dismissive. It’s matter of fact and doesn’t dead-end you. Most of all it sounds authentic. Written by someone to explain the real, human situation you are in (surprised and a bit lost), not the contents of a variable chucked onto the page by a bit of code. No “Error. This page does not exist.” bollocks.
After seeing this and experiencing it in the wild, I can’t see why you would do it any other way. A little thought about where the user is, and the best language to engage them, and… hours later, I’m possibly more impressed with the site for failing so well than anything else (the Fluid Grids article does rock, though).