Creating User Friendly 404 "Page Not Found" Error Pages

[Kristijntje]

We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak...

We can stop relying on the default behavior of our webservers and web browsers, and create our own custom 404 page...

full article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000819.html

404 Must-haves

As well as the “something went wrong” text, you should ensure that your error page has the following:

    * 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!)...

full article: http://alistapart.com/articles/perfect404/

[Kristijntje]

3 more related articles:

...the 404 page should look like the rest of the site in terms of design and aesthetics. We've seen plenty of 404 pages that look generic and don't reflect the site's design, which is unconventional and can potentially confuse users. Another way to confuse users is to automatically redirect 404s back to the home page. From an SEO perspective, 301-redirecting incorrect URLs is fine as long as you know which page your user was trying to access and point the redirect to that page. However, sending 404s to the home page can confuse users because they may not realize that the page they were trying to access doesn't exist, and they'll wonder why they ended up back on the home page....

full article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing...rror-pages

Every day you visit one of them. The pages, which don’t exist any longer, have moved to a new server or have never existed at all. Once you’ve missed your intended destination, either through a bad or outdated link, or a typo in the page you were hoping to reach, you’ll hopefully get an internal error message from the server. However, by default these messages aren’t that helpful - after all, you are looking for the information, not for the reason you can’t find this information...

full article: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/...ror-pages/

examples of good 404 pages: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/...-reloaded/