| Title: | Excellent 404 Handling |
| URL: | http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/08/17/good-404-pages/ |
| Printed: | July 4, 2009 |
| Source: | The Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog, info@rimmkaufman.com |
- August 17, 2007
- 1 comment
What happens when your users navigate to a nonexistent page?
What should happen?
Here are five interesting resources on building an excellent 404 page (”Page Not Found”):
- The Perfect 404 from A List Apart
- Creating user-friendly 404 pages from Coding Horror
- Improving the Dreaded 404 Error Message from Jakob Nielsen
- Creating an Error 404 Page from the WordPress Codex
- Correctly Creating a 404 that generates a 404 from Rocknbil at Webmaster World
The last post reminds us that “pretty” 404 pages must still return a 404 HTTP header code, so that search spiders know the page isn’t really there. This subtlety was a new one to me (though not to our web team, happily.)
I also agree with JDMorgan’s comment on keeping 404s simple:
I’m against introducing additional layers of complexity on top of an error condition, so I say that error documents should be dirt-simple static html pages with few or no external dependencies — No external images, JavaScripts, CSS, PHP or SSI include files, etc. That is so that if you get one error caused by or affecting any of these potentially-external resources, you won’t get a cascade of errors.
Agree. Avoid the complex or cute 404s like this.
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