404 Pages: How a Wrong Turn Can Be a Branding Opportunity
Now that you’ve seen the importance of custom 404 pages, I’ll explain a little about how to investigate these reversible missed opportunities. One thing you can do is to find out what pages people are trying to visit on your website. Check with your web host to see if your site has any type of analytics in the background. This could be anything from Awstats to Webtrends. It is good practice to regularly check your web log files with these tools to find out what pages people are hitting, or not finding on your website. Gathering this information may reveal images or html pages missing from your site. Below is an abbreviated screen shot of the web logs from one of my main sites:
The above grid gives me an idea of what is missing from my site and possible missed opportunities. The right column tells me how many times that particular item has been hit. Keep in mind that this is a snippet from a short time frame, so you can imagine how big the error hit-list can become if ignored.
As you can see, I am missing a few images on certain pages. No biggie, I can just re-send the missing jpegs to the server. But the other file types and directories that are missing also need to be looked at. From what I’m gathering, I had better start coding some pages and create a few of the missing directories to get things back in order. But wait, there is an entry for /cgi-bin/links.cgi. I didn’t even know I had any cgi scripts running on my server. And look, a /ddf and a /sd directory. Obviously these are randomly entered locations of my website that don’t actually exist. How am I to keep up with these? Luckily the 404 error page exists, and hopefully you are getting an idea of why to use a custom 404 error page. Taking advantage of surfing mistakes and assumptions is a great idea.
Let’s take a look at this from another angle with a real-world example. My last job was to manage a web team for a large system of art schools. We relied much upon press releases, television appearances and posters to generate new leads. Long story short, a nationally televised interview describing our offerings mentioned a visit to a URL on our website that did not exist. The result was a burst of free traffic to our HTTP code 404 error log and a totally ugly “Page Not Found” message for potential leads. Things wouldn’t have been as embarrassing if we were better prepared.
The design of your custom 404 error page should be as important as your standard approach to advertising. Branding is always number one. Even though the user sees an error page, they should still feel like they are visiting your company’s website. Even the stinky maintenance entrance door is probably adorned with a sticker or decal of the mall’s logo. With branding as the keystone, the rest is up to you. Think of the possibilities with four different yet creative ways to dress up your “Page Not Found”:
Reader Comments.
Great reading. You have opened my eyes to some interesting knowlege.
Steve Foulk your cuzzzzzz
213 631 8159
Yea 404 Error pages are a big turn off! I don’t think twice and leave the site when i get the page not found or 404 error message.Dressing it up or even just a something to put you on the right page would be awesome!
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