29th December

Web Page Tip of the Day — Upgrade Your 404 Page

by nipper. | Posted in Business & Tech Tips   2 Comments »

A “404″ page is the page a visitor to your website/blog sees if they try to visit a page that does not exist.  For instance:  http://inventblog.com/ 1234234213.

Most websites have a boring 404 page that merely says “page not found, sorry.”  Sadly, that rarely helps your visitor find what they were looking for.  

Why not do what Google recommends and “Make your 404 pages more useful” by installing a simple script on your 404 page that includes a Google search widget, a widget helps your visitors find what it was they were looking for?  It’s too simple to not do.

Related posts:

  1. Web Page Tip of the Day — Don’t Share Your “Google Juice”
  2. Web Page Tip of the Day — Does your design suck?
  3. Google — Wireless Froogle
  4. How people find this blog
  5. Google SketchUp

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Business & Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Web Page Tip of the Day — Upgrade Your 404 Page”

  1. nipper (Stephen M. Nipper) Says:
    December 29th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    New post on my blog — How to Upgrade Your Website’s/Blog’s 404 Page and help your users find what they were looking for. http://is.gd/dZI4

  2. Kevin S. Brady Says:
    December 30th, 2008 at 8:37 am

    Good advice, and far too many websites don’t take advantage of a more user-friendly 404. If you own a brick-and-mortar company, you don’t want prospective customers to not be able to find the front door, right? Why should your website be any different?

    Even a static HTML 404 page with a prominent link pointing to the homepage is better than leaving things to your host’s generic error page.

    Or you can be real creative, like this guy did:
    http://rathergood.com/404