We do everything possible to maintain an error free website but sometimes things are beyond our control and a error occurs. In the event of an error the last thing we want to do is spit some weird hax0r code out to the visitor and leave them at a dead end. Secondly we don't want to expose anything about what actually went wrong to give a potential open door to be taken advantage of. Below are a few examples of how we hare handling errors and what they look like from a visitor's point of view.

500 - Something went wrong

The first is the campus directory search (opens new window) which is an interface to look up faculty, staff and student information straight from the LDAP directory. Almost all of our websites use some sort of localized database of the larger official databases at the university to ensure the data is going to be available when the visitor is looking for it. It also ensures the application is fast, we all know the faster a website is the more people will use it.

In this case though we are pulling right from the live directory, because of the sheer size of the information and need for it to be up to date immediately. Since we are not the only site accessing this service it can be under heavy load at times. In our tests it returns the results very quickly 99% of the time but there is that off chance it doesn't return anything within 15 seconds. To us this is unacceptable so we display an error message to the visitor letting them know they should try again. We have the same message about "Our office dog, Sparky, has chewed some wire" and for them to try again. The dog on the other hand changes from a cute dog like the one pictured above to a few others that make the message far more entertaining.

404 - Document not found

As we move more sites into a central web environment and combine pages, files and centralize domains we always create a massive redirect document to ensure any old references to pages, files and images get redirected properly to their new locations. This works over 90% of the time but there is the off chance that files get missed or things get moved after the fact and something is actually missing.

We have a standard 404 page that gets built on every one of our sites that frankly is a little bland. Partly because we want to make it useful and give the use as much information as possible and then give them a search box to look for their file. We also want to ensure the context around the missing document stays in tact so we put the text in the template of the site so the visitor can use the navigation. It's not the most entraining but it works for the over 400 sites we manage.

During the last redesign of the campus events calendar (opens new window) we decided we needed to have a little fun with missing events. It's not often that an event gets added then deleted but it does happen. When a visitor lands on an event that was removed they get the screen above. It's our way of saying  sorry while still making someone smile. We know we can't make up for the missing event completely but we can turn a little frustration into comedy.

It feels odd showcasing error pages but these were just too good to keep hidden. Hope this is your only encounter with them but in the off chance you do run in to one of these rest assure we are logging all errors and actively working on fixing them.