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Lost_and_404_Not_Found
| Lost and 404 Not Found
Are you sometimes tooling around on the web, clicking your way
through links, when suddenly you come to a dreaded dead end: the
404 Not Found page? Do you wonder what those darn error pages
are all about? They are often brick walls that force you to back
track, and they can be very annoying. If you have a website, you
want to make sure that visitors to your site aren’t led into one
of these dead ends. If these dead links are exasperating to you
when you are surfing the Net, they are exasperating to your
guests as well, the last people you want to annoy. But, if
utilized correctly, 404 pages can actually help your visitors
find the content they were searching for. They do not need to be
brick walls.
What is a 404 page?
404 is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol status code. Hypertext
Transfer Protocol is the protocol web servers use to communicate
with web browsers. When you type in a URL to try to visit a web
page, your computer sends a request message to the server and
the server sends back the HTTP header to your browser, which
includes a status message before you even see the web page.
Normally, if everything is correct, the status code is “200 OK”,
but you don’t see it because you see the page you were looking
for. But if the server cannot find the page you are looking for,
it reports the status as “404 Not Found”.
But what does it really mean?
The numbers 4-0-4 each actually mean something as individual
digits. The first 4 is telling you, the client, that there is a
mistake on your end, such as a possibly mistyped URL or a
request for a page that no longer exists. The 0 just represents
a syntax error- it basically just means “something isn’t right”.
Now after the 4-0, the last number could be any one of several
digits that indicates the type of error. The 4 in that section
means that the page cannot be located. Another status messages
could be 401, which means you are unauthorized to view that
page.
There is a clever myth behind the 404 Not Found message. The
story goes that 404 was the room number of the room where the
very first web servers were located. But there story includes a
mystery- there is no room 404 in that building at CERN, where
the first web servers were held. So the 404 Not Found code is a
bit of an inside joke for those who have heard the story.
How To Utilize Status Code Information
You can use your log files to spot “404s” by reviewing the logs
of your status codes. Take note any of 404 occurrences. If there
seem to be quite a few, more than you could chalk up to user
error, you might have a broken link in there somewhere. Check
the referring page, the page the user was at just before
arriving that the 404, then inspect that page to find the broken
link and fix it. If you do not have access to your log files,
you can request them from your website host.
So why exactly do these 404 error pages exist?
The 404 Not Found Page comes up on your screen for several
different reasons.
1) The page may have been moved. In this case, it is as though
you are trying to visit a friend when you find a note taped to
their door that says they have moved. But it doesn’t tell you
where they moved to. Not very helpful, is it? The 404 Not Found
page is a note like that.
2) The hyperlink you followed my have a minor error in the URL.
3) The page may simply be gone. Not moved. Just taken down. And
whatever linked you to it doesn’t know it. This is a form of
Linkrot.
Linkrot refers to outdated or abandoned URLs across the
Internet. If you take a page down or change the URL, other sites
that have links to your page will have the wrong URL, causing
Linkrot to occur, and sending people who click on those links,
expecting to come to your page, right for a lovely visit from
the Error Page Fairy.
How do you avoid the Error Page? Help stop Linkrot. If links
continue to lead to dead ends, the flow of the Internet will be
interrupted, dramatically reducing the usability of the web. You
may not be able to stop another site from screwing up URLs
linking to your site and creating a dead link to your site, but
you can at least maintain the links and pages on your own site.
You must regularly check the outgoing links from your site to
make certain that they still lead to existing pages. It is your
responsibility to ensure that the links on your site lead to
actual destinations and not error pages. Internal links should
be maintained as well. AlertBox’s Jakob Nielsen believes that
URLs should “live forever”; that there is no reason to let a
page you built languish abandoned and outdated.
Of course, sometimes you cannot help but remove a page or change
its URL, and you will not be able to always prevent the
occurrence of an Error Page. But if you can’t avoid an Error
Page, at least make it work for you!
Good Error Page: Not An Oxymoron
Turn an error into an advantage by designing your own error page
for your site and making it interesting, informative, helpful,
and even fun.
According to Jakob Nielsen there are 5 rules for making a good
Error Page:
1) Design an error page specific to your site, rather than
sending your visitors to the browser’s standard Error page.
2) Politely apologize and tell your user that that page cannot
be found on that URL, and apologize for the inconvenience.
3) Include a list of suggested links of pages that might hold
the information they are looking for, after studying your log
files to see which errors are made the most.
4) If you can, have your server automatically run a spelling
check on the requested URL to search for any spelling mistakes
and suggest possible corrections, and make those suggestions
direct links to those pages.
5) Lastly, have your error page contain a search field so as a
last resort your user can search your site for what they were
looking for.
“Area 404”, a website dedicated to creativity and usability of
error pages, has performed what they call a “highly scientific”
survey of 1375 people regarding the usability of error pages.
Their survey consisted of one question:
When you encounter a 404 do you: A) Hit the back button and
forget about it. B) Try to get to the homepage to locate the
missing page. C) Write to the Webmaster. D) Weep uncontrollably.
The results were: 36.92% hit the back button and forgot about
it. 20.37% tried to get the to homepage to locate the missing
page. Only 2.82% actually took the time to write to the
Webmaster (Webmasters take note of this). And 39.88% of those
surveyed said they wept uncontrollably.
What have we learned from this ultra-scientific survey? People
do not like error pages! But if you can make your page catchy
and helpful, you will keep people on your site.
Area 404 has their own guidelines to what makes a good 404 page.
In addition to the ones listed by Jakob Nielsen, they add that
you could include a link to contact the Webmaster to inform them
of the error. They definitely suggest that you at the very least
include a link to your homepage.
Make Sure They See Your Error Page
Sometimes you may find that the Internet Explorer browser does
not display your own homemade error page and instead insists on
displaying it’s own friendly version. Though their version may
be nicer to look at than the classic “404 Not Found” page, it is
not as helpful or useful for your customers as your own page, so
you will want to make sure your page is the one that is
displayed.
You can force Internet Explorer to stop ignoring your page and
start displaying it by making sure it is greater than 512 bytes,
not including graphics. At that size, IE will not ignore it and
will display your page instead of its standard one. 512 bytes
gives you a great deal of space to work with, which you can fill
up with text on the actual page or in comments in the source
code.
Examples
Ok, so we know what sort of information you should include on
your error pages to make them usable for your visitors. But what
creative ways can you make your 404 pages a pleasure rather than
a pain? Here are some examples from Area 404:
404 Something went screwy!
I have all good intentions that you should never, ever see this
page, but the best-laid schemes of mice and men oft' go
astray...uh...in this case, it's the URL you were attempting to
access that seems to have gone astray.
If the link you followed resides on foo.net, please send e-mail
to example@foo.net. You can return to familiar territory by
using your browser's BACK button, or start fresh at the front
door and perhaps you'll find what you were looking for.
www.foo.net
Of course if you just found this page because you're hooked on
404's, you'll enjoy following these other links instead: 404
Error 404 Research Lab
To see other examples of how creative 404 pages can be, either
purposefully go out and look for them by mistyping URLs
willy-nilly, or check out Area 404’s treasure trove of examples
at http://www.plinko.net/404/area404.asp.
Redirects
Now there is an alternative to displaying an error page. If you
find there is a page that is consistently getting mistyped, or
if you have moved a page that you know many people will be
trying to view, instead of just showing them an error page you
can automatically redirect them to the correct page. You can use
a 404 in correlation with redirection, by having a 404 page that
informs you visitor “We’re sorry, that page has moved. In a few
second you will be automatically redirect to the correct page.”
That makes it easy for your visitors, since they just have to
sit back and wait, rather than having to click links to find the
new page themselves. Have that page be displayed for about 4 or
5 seconds, and then have the server send them to the right page.
The HTML for redirects is simple. It will tell the server to
automatically “refresh” the page, but by refreshing it will
bring up a different URL. Here is the code:
The “CONTENT” is the amount of seconds before the page is
refreshed. In this example, it is 5 seconds.
Conclusion: 404s CAN be fun
As you can see, there is more to error pages than the boring,
dreaded, stereotypical 404 Not Found page. Website usability
extends even beyond your working pages and into the realm of
Pages Lost And 404 Not Found! Make it ALL work for you.
About the author:
Meghan Whitmore is a professional copywriter and part of the
Directory One search engine optimization and website design
team. For more information, please visit:
http://www.directoryone.com
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