We’ve all run into error pages in our travels through the internet – some good, some bad. What made the good ones good and the bad ones bad? Many sites simply tell you the page your requested isn’t found and they’re sorry. Sure, that gets the point across, but what about being nice to users?
It’s easy to customize 404 error pages on your site, and you should! Here are some approaches to take and why they’re good:
- Humor: post a graphic or joke to keep the mistake lighthearted and turn a bad thing into a fun time
- Features: give the user a list of current features on the site, or other pages you think they should visit
- Search: with a little coding, you can get the title of the link that brought them to the page. Use that to search your site and try to provide them with links to relevant articles
There are countless other things you could do with them. Feel free to post ideas and screen shots below!
One Response to “Using Error Pages to your Advantage”
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Great point. I can’t remember quite when it was that I found out that if you crash a tab in Google Chrome it quotes Star Trek. instead of getting frustrated and threatening my computer, I cracked up. And then preceded to repeat the process, and show my parent who are both trekkies.