Contingency Design
Contingency matters. Every once in awhile we’ll retire a page from The Leader Board, or break a link without knowing it. This even happens to the best of us. It is a web designer’s job to help people out when the inevitable happens. Frankly, everyone I know is just too talented at developing web sites to only display the standard Rails error page when things go wrong. Maybe errors don’t happen enough to notice, so we all just ignore them and continue on our way. I know that contingency design isn’t that exciting, but we have crafted a new error page that helps our customers get back on track.
To throw an error so you can check out the page, simply visit:
http://newleaders.com/error
Here is what we came up with:
Go Back — A simple link that acts as a back button to put you right where you were a second ago.
Search — You can find anything on this site by using Google. Search for it.
Contact — You can contact us easily if you want to complain about, or inform us of, our broken links.
Recommended Reading — Maybe that article has been retired. Here are some alternatives.
Whether you want to offer all these options to your visitors, or just create something humorous like the Twitter fail whale, it is up to you. The important thing to remember is that every road leads somewhere, even if the destination wasn’t as intended.
Posted on Dec 01, 2008 by Kevin Milden
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