Blogging And All That Malarkey

Did a greedy capitalist steal that page?

I hope that New Internationalist readers will never see 404 Page Not Found.

Countless articles have helped to explain the value of a custom designed 404 page over a server generated warning. While they are often not the most interesting or creatively challenging, a clearly designed 404 page can help enormously when a reader finds themselves typing a bad URL or following a dead or incorrect link.

Certain elements are essential to an effective, custom 404. ~~The Green Goblin~~ Jakob Nielsen wrote about them in 1998, as did Ian Lloyd on A List Apart in 2004.

A link to the site map (if you have one) and the home page. This is the easiest way for users to bail out. This no-brainer requires no clever scripting.
A search box. If you have a site search, add it to your 404 page. If you don’t have a site search and are in the habit of generating 404 errors, perhaps you should get one.
A distinctly minimalist look. Avoid putting all your standard site navigation on this page. You should aim to remove distractions. Besides, insisting on including a complete site navigation strip may present a maintentance overhead (your 404 page can easily lag behind the rest of the site if it is not dynamically updated with the rest of your site and the last thing you want is to have navigation on the 404 that is no longer relevant/working. Oh the irony!)

That doesn't mean of course that you can't have a little fun and lighten the mood when things go wrong.

I have attempted to bring all of this together for the New Internationalist 404 page.

404 (View in your browser)

Although I'm sure that New Internationalist editors will change the copy before my redesign is launched, for now I'm running with;

Oops! Sorry that you ended up here — 404

We are very sorry, but what you were looking for is not here.
Maybe you clicked a bad link somewhere, or perhaps that page has been stolen by a greedy capitalist.

Funny you should say that

Writing this entry gave me an idea. How about you, New Internationalist readers or interested web geeks, write the 404 copy? You can be as weird, funny, stinging or sarcastic as you like.

I can't promise that your copy will make it to the redesigned site, but if it does, I'm sure that my friends at New Internationalist can sort you out with a little something to sweeten the deal.

Leave your comment

Rircky Onsman

May 25 2009 @ 10:17am #

Sorry, you’ve ended up on an error page.

Yes, it IS a conspiracy.
Or maybe there was a bad link or some mis-typing somewhere.
Anyway, let’s get you out of here.

[home], [search], [browse]

Chris Wallace

May 25 2009 @ 10:29am #

Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on this trend. I think your points are great on what needs to be on the 404 page though.

Bjarni

May 25 2009 @ 10:52am #

Opps I need to create a 404 page for my site, Ive been leaving it for far too long.

Jylan Wynne

May 25 2009 @ 08:27pm #

Here’s mine:

Would you mind swapping lives for a while? I don’t have any time for going around visiting NON-EXISTENT URLs!

melanie

May 25 2009 @ 11:59pm #

One of the very best 404 pages I ever saw was at Twitpic. It was a video of a narcoleptic dog. A choice video, possibly lodged at youtube, might be refreshing :)

Otherwise, I like all the suggestions above!

Phillip Smith

May 26 2009 @ 12:03am #

@melanie You’re so right.

Andy: We’ve had that advise before too—including more video on the site—so that’s something that we should definitely consider / discuss going forward.

Currently, there are videos shot for each issue, e.g.: http://www.newint.org/issues/2009/03/01/

And I have footage for the About page, Co-op page, Jobs page, etc. (Just needs some editing.)

Phillip.

Melanie

May 26 2009 @ 12:14am #

That’s great - more video is key (for all sites). Especially citizen media ;)

One thing I’m noticing as my students get younger (and especially when I teach high school students), they love video (or anything truly interactive). They will read text, of course, and listen to a talking head. But they’d much prefer to watch something engaging. I showed Lessig’s TED to all of my students. Most of them tune out until it gets to the mashups. Then it’s 100 % attention. There’s something about that ...

Maybe you could partner with Open Source cinema to do a citizen-produced remix thing (they offer the Kaltura tools along with the “how to” - I made my very first mashup there using some screen grabs from second life and a found techno track from their site.

As I transition into secondary teaching next year, I’ll likely be teaching some politics/civics next year at the high school. I want tools on sites like yours to direct young people to A) learn more about what’s going on in the world B) take part C) create something.

I’m sure tapping into the youth market is one of your objectives but maybe I could encourage you to think a bit more about how you include them on your site. Young people (high school aged and up) are our future activists and world changers. Please give them tools and let them have access to your wonderful archives and assets :)

Phillip Smith

May 26 2009 @ 12:19am #

@Melanie Like those ideas. Keep ‘em coming. :-)

Thomas Jaggi

May 26 2009 @ 05:25pm #

I agree a video could be funny but in my opinion a 404 should be primarily helpful. While a funny sentence doesn’t nee much space a video would push the informative content further to the bottom. And I suspect an inexpertly user could even get confused by such a video…

Laura

May 26 2009 @ 11:49pm #

How about landing them on a page that auto generates an inspiring quote, great pix, etc. for the day. Congratulate the person for discovering one of the site’s easter eggs. (heck you could even generate a coupon for your site or somesuch!) Something fun, uplifting (or whatever kind of theme your site has). the page logs that someone hit it and the path they took and sends that to the webmaster… and shows the site map to the person browsing.

(um, also, is there some reason the text boxes that we need to fill in our name and email are yellow with white texxt??? who can read that!!! Great site!! thank you for all you do.

Phillip Smith

May 27 2009 @ 12:07am #

@Laura - Neat ideas. Really like the idea of offering a discount in the NI shops (though we wouldn’t want to publicize that too much!).

NI has also been looking for a place to use the “Speechmarks” content from the magazine on the site, so that’s an interesting idea too.

Regarding the “page logs that someone hit it and the path they took and sends that to the webmaster,” unfortunately it’s not possible to fully automate (though we tried), as there are 1000s of 404s encountered everyday by nefarious “bots” and spiders and so on. On the current 404 page, we do offer the person the option of notifying the Web Team, as long as they can prove that they’re a real person (or a smart bot).

Phillip.

Louis W

May 27 2009 @ 01:57am #

“There was an error while trying to generate this page, the template 404.tpl could not be found”

This is an honest to god error I once saw on a client’s site. Not being able to to find a 404 error template - there is some kind of irony there.

craig zheng

May 27 2009 @ 03:30am #

I think it’s worth remembering, and I think Andy’s on the right track here, that when someone lands on a 404 page they’re usually trying to get somewhere else. I think it’s probably best to fight the urge to clutter the 404 page with various bits of content, and instead keep it dead simple and make a good faith effort to get the user to wherever s/he is trying to go.

At most, if it’s possible given your setup, I’d provide a list of the most-visited pages/posts on the site.

Phillip Smith

May 27 2009 @ 03:52am #

Craig “I think it’s worth remembering, and I think Andy’s on the right track here, that when someone lands on a 404 page they’re usually trying to get somewhere else. “

Point taken. :-)

“At most, if it’s possible given your setup, I’d provide a list of the most-visited pages/posts on the site.”

Totally possible. Neat idea too.

Phillip.

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Did a greedy capitalist steal that page?

Oops! Sorry that you ended up here — 404

Funny you should say that

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Louis W

Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke