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Effective Maintenance Pages: Examples and Best Practices

Every website has to perform maintenance at some point or another. Whether it's just to upgrade a portion of the site or because of some problem with the site, it's an inevitable fact of website ownership. And in many cases, maintenance requires taking your site offline for at least a few minutes.

So what should you do if your site is going to be down for maintenance? You don't want users coming to a 404 or other error page. And hopefully you'd like to encourage them to come back to your site sooner rather than later, right? If that's the case, you'll need to build a custom maintenance page. Below we present a list of best practices to building effective maintenance pages that will help keep your visitors, whether new or returning, happy.

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404 Error Pages: Reloaded

Three weeks ago we’ve showcased some of the most beautiful, creative and user-friendly 404 Error Pages; we’ve collected some interesting ideas one can use to help out the visitors once they got lost ony your page. We’ve also asked our readers to design their own 404 pages and promised to present the best solutions afterwards.

We’ve received over 100 entries. The choice wasn’t easy, so evaluating the quality of the entries we’ve considered - among other things - the communication with visitors, precise and clear navigation, the use of graphics, creative ideas and some outstanding solutions. Some of the solutions presented below might not be as helpful as they could or should be, however they include some creative approaches you should be aware of designing your 404 error pages.

We’d like to thank to everyone who participated, your input means a lot for us and for web-designers worldwide. You help to improve the quality of the Web. Don’t underestimate it.

So here is what you’ve come out with: over 45 working examples of user-friendly, creative and outstanding 404 error pages - in a brief overview.

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Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages

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