7/26/2005 9:47

You gotta love companies that take something as bland and irritating as a 404 error page and do something fun with it. For instance, while browsing Technorati yesterday, I accidentally typed an extra character in the URL. Instead of getting the standard "page not found" message, I got:

"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

Very clever. This got me wondering whether there are other interesting 404 pages lurking about, and guess what? There are entire Web sites devoted to this topic. For instance, there is the 404 Research Lab (warning: some of the links on this site are R-rated, but many of the 404 pages are pretty funny). And a simple Google search yields dozens of discussions on the topic.

The reason I bring this up? Companies could be missing a great opportunity to communicate with site visitors by "neglecting" their 404 page. Some of the suggestions I found on the 404 Research site include:

*Encourage people to go somewhere other than back by providing links to key pages on the site.
*Include a search box to search the site.
*List the links on the site that are similar to what was entered, in order to guess what the visitor was looking for.

The point being to keep people on the site and/or drive them to pages you want them to visit.

Marqui will be revamping its Web site in the next few weeks, so it'll be interesting to see what we can cook up along these lines...

Posted by at July 26, 2005 9:47 AM

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