Monkeys working for YouTube

In Web Design by Leon Add comments

It’s the end of the week and what better way to start the weekend than with a laugh. If you’ve been on YouTube recently, you may have seen the amazing video on the Boston Dynamics Big Dog. This video shows some insight on the advances in robotic technology. If you didn’t see it, see it here:

Boston Dynamics Big Dog:

Personally I found the ice section most amazing.

So, while I was browsing on YouTube I got a ‘500 Internal Server Error’ page. It was the first time I’d seen it, and surprisingly it gave me a good laugh. An excerpt reads:

Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkey has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Please report this incident to customer service.

But I’m sure Google doesn’t pay its monkeys with bananas ;)

The use of humour in error pages is a great way to help keep a visitor on your website. YouTube’s Internal Server Error page gets high marks for creative writing, however personally I think they can improve on presentation. Error pages (such as 404’s, 500’s etc.) can be used and presented to fit in with your website’s design, helping retain visitors when they think your site has gone offline.

500 Internal Server Error

Share:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • TwitThis
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • YahooMyWeb

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Monkeys working for YouTube”

  1. Sean
    9 months ago

    Great site design Leon! I love the ornate tiled background.
    I agree with the thing about adding humour and personality to error messages, it works well to lighten the mood when something goes wrong. Found some other good 404 pages too: http://www.mamselle.ca/error.html and http://www.squareoak.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/zug-404.gif

  2. Leon
    9 months ago

    Hey Sean, thanks for stopping by and thanks for the comments! You’ve got yourself the official title of ‘first comment ever’ for this site ;) I checked out those links too and you’ve got some quality examples of humorous error page handling..

Leave a Reply

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.