Every once in a while we have to take our site down for upgrades, or god forbid something breaks and we have to fix it and we don’t want to leave the broken version for our users to see.
I was inspired to write this after seeing the funny Technorati maintenance page this morning:
Maintenance pages are important for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is to make people remember to come back. If someone is visiting your site for the first time and you are currently working on your site and have placed it in maintenance mode typically you will replace your index with a page explaining the downtime and encouraging users to check back later (giving a specific time frame is good practice).