Have you ever gotten lost when visiting a site and gotten that ever-so-ugly and irritating Error 404 page? A rhetorical question, really, since we’ve all gotten lost at some site at some time or another. But the real question is, have you ever gotten that error page and immediately left the site because of it?

Should this happen to a user browsing your site, that’s bad news for you. Often times the user would end up staying if only given proper direction when getting lost on a site. Thankfully, there are ways to avoid that bland, ugly 404 page and keep the users at your site. You can custom design it!

There are actually a good many things you can do to a 404 page to make it functional for your site. Obviously, you want to make sure it ends up looking like the rest of your site so the user only feels like he/she merely took a wrong turn rather than getting completely lost in a foreign land.

Other good practices include:

• Have a clear message to the user that states the problem and what happened and offer suggestions/solutions.
• No technical talk about the 404 Error. It doesn’t mean anything to most users.
• Including a search box is very handy so the user can go directly to where they were originally intending to go.
• A link to the home page.
• A link to the site map that in turn links to all the main sections of the site.
• Never redirect a user automatically to the home page. The user will not understand how they ended up at the home page because they never actually got an error. Rather than assisting the user, you would just end up confusing him/her more.
• Of course, there’s an opportunity to have some fun with the 404 page. You can include some humor or something interesting for the user to see when they get to the 404 page. This way, the user doesn’t get so annoyed. Rather than feeling like they got lost, they instead feel like the discovered something new, a kind of hidden treasure if you will.

You can check out my 404 page. I took the humorous route with mine and included a rather hilarious image.

Tags: 404, Error Page

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Findability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.