Don't miss out on business because of 404 errors

Have you heard of a '404-Error' before?

If you have ever visited a page of a website that has been moved, deleted or renamed, or if you typed in part of the address wrong yourself or even clicked on a broken link, you’ll see an error telling you that there’s no page at that address. The technical name for this is a ‘404’ error - Page Not Found, and they’re very important to handle correctly.

When a website doesn’t have a custom 404 error page, website users will see the hosting company's default error screen which as a general rule isn't all that useful, and starts to create a sense of frustration for website visitors, and in many cases becomes the point of abandonment for the user leaving your website. Once you've spent all the time and effort in driving traffic to a website we certainly don't want to see the user leave without spending time on your site!

It's actually possible to customise your 404 error pages that website visitors will see on your website. This allows you to make the page look exactly like any other page of your website maintaining your branding and professional appearance along with access to your site's navigation menu, but at the same time displaying a clear message to your visitors telling them that the page they were looking for has not been found. A simple statement to include on the page is: “Sorry, it looks like we couldn’t find the page you were looking for”. I also recommend the inclusion of a simple on-page site map or search box, so that the user can quickly locate the area or page of the website that they want to go to and you direct them along their way. 

Remember that a 404 error page may be the first page a user sees of your website and it’s an error page. They might assume the entire site is down, where actually the only problem is that a page has been renamed. Users don't tend to expend the energy thinking about what the issue might be and problem solving this for you!

Some websites even use the 404 page as another place to push their products onto visitors. “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for… so why not have a look at these other items instead…”

I've even seen a few funny customised 404 error messages from companies used to generate 'viral' marketing, and encourage discussion about their company online such as the following:

http://www.dilbert.com/sadsad

http://patterntap.com/gfdgdf

http://www.nextwaveperformance.com/oops.html

http://www.soocial.com/404

http://www.southparkstudios.com/404

Every website hosting operating system, and development application has a different manner in which they can implement customised 404 Error Pages, and some are definitely more complex then others. Search Group can assist your online marketing efforts working with your current designer or developer, or independant to these, and provide a customised 404 Error Page to suit your brand requirements.

We recommend to clients monitoring error pages like your 404 error page in your website, using website analytics to determine what drives traffic to this point and identifying and resolving these problems whether internal or external causes.