December 05, 2001
Blog Entry

Don't lose visitors on your Error 404 page: redirect!

SUMMARY: No summary available.
Sherpa reader Barbara Kaplowitz just emailed in her favorite bad-web-design page:thispagecannotbedisplayed.com, which reminds me of the advice EVERY Internet marketing consultant on this planet has given in their newsletters and/or speechs since the beginning of time (and yet still most of us blithely ignore it - including bad-me) which is:

When your users try to access a page on your site that's not there anymore, or their link was slightly wrong, don't just send them to an ordinary "Error 404: File not found" page that your techies out up when they built the site. Instead, use the page to redirect the visitors to ... well, wherever you want them to go!

[Note: after I posted this, Hollis Thomases of WebAdvantage.net emailed in, "Give it time and let it go for as long as you can stand it: http://www.binaryinc.org/404.html"

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