Fresh

If you use the internet, chances are that you have seen a 404 error page. It is basically inevitable. The 404 error page will be displayed whenever someone asks for a page that is not available. There are many possible reasons for this error; it could be an incorrect link somewhere on your site or someone made a typo when entering the URL.

At the bottom of this post is a table that explains the various error code messages.

Unfortunately the 404 error page is usually an afterthought, or not a thought at all. Let’s get creative! When designing a custom 404 error page, consider the company’s culture, and the type of response desired by their audience. These will no doubt lighten the actuality of the situation (the page they wanted can’t be found) and possibly steer them into a different direction and increase exploration of the site.

I have scoured the web for clever 404 error pages and compiled a list of 25 for your enjoyment. This list is relatively short compared to other websites such as:

• 60 Really Cool and Creative Error 404 Pages
• 49 Nice and Creative Error 404 Pages
• 36 Cool custom Error 404 Pages
• The 100 Most Funny & Unusual 404 Error Pages

Get inspired to create a custom 404 error page for your site!
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Your users.  They have opinions about a lot of things.  They probably have opinions about your site and what’s on it.  What’s the best way to collect those opinions in order make your site better?  The easier it is for your users to tell you what they think, the better. Here are a few ways for your users to give feedback painlessly.

“Was this helpful?”

In a situation where you want to help the user find an answer to a question, or learn how to do something with your product or service, you can ask them directly: “Was this helpful?”  or “Did this answer your question?”  Allowing the user to also leave a comment along with their “Yes/No” answer (most likely “no” if they are frustrated enough to leave a comment) might give you some insight into what they were looking for and how you can improve the content itself, or the search algorithm to better help answer their question in the future. But the “Yes/No” buttons alone, along with a good look at your help documentation search logs, might be enough to show where you may have dropped the ball in your documentation.

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A few weeks ago a bunch of us from eROI went to see Jared Spool present “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon”. It was a fantastic presentation about some key learnings about e-commerce design from experiments on Amazon.com. One tid-bit really especially struck a chord with me: Jared went in-depth about Amazon’s review system and conjectured that to amass 20 reviews for a product online one must have had 26,000 sales (on average one out of 1,300 purchasers will write a review.) Assuming the site has a 2% conversion rate (a typical rate for e-comm) the product needs to have 1.3 Million hits to reach 20 reviews.

What!? Only one in 1,300 purchasers will write a review?? That seems like a depressing statistic for people hoping to use user reviews as a means to help sell their products online! Another drawback is that customers are also a lot more likely to go back to a site to write a bad review versus a positive review (if the product is just as they expected, the user goes on living their life. If it isn’t, they want to tell someone about it.)

Fear not, there are some creative ways we can overcome the challenges!

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