Show Off Your Custom Error Pages (404, etc)

[EJRS.COM]

What do you think of my custom error page? http://reelinthefish.net/ok

Show off your custom error pages

[WiseWizards]

Hello!

This is our website's custom error page:

http://mnaper.tripod.com/404error

It's doesn't contain any humor stuff, but I'd like to see if the page contains everything it should. I'm thinking about maybe adding a character from our website saying something like the AngelFire error pages, for example "Great, now you've gone and done it. You've broken the Internet. Way to go!...
Actually, we couldn't find the page you requested."
What do you think?

Sincerely,
Mike
http://MikeysTown.com

[richkoi]

These are mine:

http://www.bambooheadquarters.com/404page.html
http://www.botanicalpartners.com/404page.html
http://www.richkoi.com/404page.html

Not mine, but I thought it was clever:

http://www.homestarrunner.com/systemisdown.html

Rich

[WiseWizards]

Hello!

I love the fake 'This page cannot be displayed.' error page! I almost closed it thinking you gave the wrong address! LOL

Sincerely
Mike

[obuwebco]

404 page

http://www.obuweb.com/error/404.php

[Weedy Lady]

I used to use a clever 404 page, but now just use a redirect to my site. So instead of telling people they didn't get to my site and then inviting them to visit it by clicking again they get there automatically.

Is there a problem with doing it this way?

[SyrenSong]

Both of these were done as little "surprises" for my clients.

MommyMojo 404 page

USS Biddle 404 page

Neither one is particularly spectacular, but they were both fun to do, and provided the necessary info to try and help visitors find what they were looking for.

BTW, Rich, that was cute! For a minute, I thought it wasn't going to show up in my non-IE browser. LOL!

[ppayne]

Here's ours:

http://www.jlist.com/notthere.html

It's very simple, and provides a form for people to tell us what page they were trying to access. People usually help us find the dead links on the site.

[DrTandem1]

Here's one I did:

http://www.lotionlady.com/missing.html

For an e-commerce site, it's important to not lose the visitor.

[cooper]

http://www.coopergriggs.com/flash/nf.html

I had so much fun with this. Make sure you have Flash, your sound on and a little time to kill.

:o)

[jeff21up]

http://21up.co.uk/failed.htm

[andy206uk]

Here's one I did for a client:

http://www.speeding.co.uk/404.html

:o)

[jeff21up]

Like it along the same lines as mine good advertising eh? lol
jeff

[andy206uk]

Yeah... it's a briliant way to keep customers in the site that might be about to leave.

I think a 404 page should say more than just "page not found". It should contain at least the main site navigation so that the customer can try again, a link to the previous page and/or the sites homepage.

A little humour never goes amiss either. ;)

Andy

[Kevnn]

It's not mine, but as I was reading this topic I got an email from a friend wanting me to check this link out: http://www.micoks.net/~nanook/koty.swf

Since the timing was so good, I thought I share it with you.

[TrafficProducer]

Fishy Error Opps! I feel sea sick! (Joke)

LOL neat 404 page.

It could auto-link to the index page if you like.

[Dragonsi]

Sorry to bore everyone, but mine are usually alone these lines....

www.pembdirectory.co.uk/images/index.htm

:(

[texcited]

Here is my error page.
http://www.gardenoutfitters.com/error404.html
I always like to have links to other pages so that the customer can still navigate around. That way at least you have a chance of selling something!
-Texcited

[EJRS.COM]

Wow y'all have pretty awesome error pages.

Mikey,

It's doesn't contain any humor stuff, but I'd like to see if the page contains everything it should. I'm thinking about maybe adding a character from our website saying something like the AngelFire error pages, for example "Great, now you've gone and done it. You've broken the Internet. Way to go!...
Actually, we couldn't find the page you requested."
What do you think?

Yeah you oughtta do somethingfunny since your site's all about cartoon/arcade games. Will add more viewer interest :)

Rich,
I like your error pages. Especially the bamboo. I am from Malaysia. Did you know the word BAMBOO is actually from Malaysia (I'm from here). We spell it bambu.
Other Malaysian words are ORANG UTAN (ORANG means Man, UTAN is actually HUTAN which means Jungle, so it's "Man of the Jungle"), BATIK and SATAY.

[WiseWizards]

Hello!

Thanks for the reply! I'll take your advice and probably add something within the month, whenever I finish the other planned updates.

Sincerely,
Mike

[EJRS.COM]

Hi ya Weedy Lady,
Nope there is nothing wrong with redirecting viewers from yr error pages back into your main pages. prob good.

SyrenSong,
There seems to be a prob accessing your 2 sites - maybe bandwidth probs or the server is real slow or something.

Cooper,
You da man. That was really funny. Hahahaha. Good job man.

Traffic,

Fishy Error Opps! I feel sea sick! (Joke)

That's funny. can I use this? Hahaha.

LOL neat 404 page.
It could auto-link to the index page if you like.

How do I do this?[/quote]

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by EJRS.COM

Hi ya Weedy Lady,
Nope there is nothing wrong with redirecting viewers from yr error pages back into your main pages.

EJRS, Weedy Lady, and all,
I would disagree. Usability includes, that an expectation is met. An error page is a clear indication for a user, that something went wrong, I might have mistyped or followed an old link. If I for example try to navigate in a site by removing the page part of an URL, i.e. turning

.../subject_a/page_one.html

into

../subject_a/

I'd expect ideally a page that is the overview for subject_a (like .../subject_a/index.html) or an error page (404), if this does not exist. By the way, it is a good practice to always supply such overview pages - not that my site would do this consistently :-(

To redirect to your home page is also not nice to your fellow webmasters, who linked to you site. They can never check if a link is brocken, as it always returns the home page. And one might deliberately link deep into one page on your site. Errors are part of a protocol and in my mind it is not a good idea to eliminate them. (As it is not a good idea for VeriSign to exploit DNS errors for their business benefit).

I'd advocate for one of the nice and fancy Error pages shown in this post. If you want, you can add some important content, such as the special of the month to make your error page sell and show some incentive to stay on your site. however, leave a clear indication that I ended up doing an error (including the error code 404, etc.). Because without error, the user can't learn!

See you around

K<o>

[Kevnn]

I like your thinking on this one. An error page can be shown to insure the user knows there was an error. And you can always use a timed redirect to take them to your home page after a couple seconds so they don't leave your site right away.

[Weedy Lady]

"To redirect to your home page is also not nice to your fellow webmasters, who linked to you site."

Thanks for your comments. I never thought about the above. Will do a real 404 page again, with a delayed redirect.

You folks are really great for taking the time to read everyone's reply and give helpful responses!!!

[rsteele4]

We like to keep things simple, so...
http://www.colorprintingcentral.com/401.shtml

[GSO]

Here is my 404 error page:
http://GlobalSpecOps.com/error.html

[carbonize]

http://www.carbonize.co.uk/404.php basic page that uses meta refresh to forward you to my index page after 20 seconds (or is it 10?). It shows you the url you requested and I also have it log all requested urls and the referer if there is one at http://www.carbonize.co.uk/whoops.txt. It's amazing to see some of the 404's you get. Mistyped urls, cached pages trying to get old images, worms/hack attempts, typos in your links, and best of all the recent one where I deleted an entire directory by accident and didn't notice until I was at work :|

[ExcelontheWeb]

Here is on of my cheesy
(compared to some others ; -)
404 pages for a client

http://www.blackthunder.com/404.htm

[MidNite]

http://www.jadespider.com/oops

[sijpie]

Although the list is getting quite long, here is one of my pages. http://www.palmvenue.com/404.asp

[Weedy Lady]

"To redirect to your home page is also not nice to your fellow webmasters, who linked to you site."

I have now posted an error page that is actually an error page, with a request for people to visit my site and if they wish, to let me know which page they couldn't get. Is this better? If not, what should I do to make it right?

My stats are showing an enormous number of 404's, and yet my html editor doesn't find any missing or broken links. How is this?

[Weedy Lady]

forgot to include the url to the error page:
http://www.happydaycards.com/missing.html

[sajdlz]

WeedyLady.. see if you can pull up in your stats what pages are coming back as errors. I know that I often type urls from memory or change urls at sites I am familiar with and make a typo.. thus getting that dreaded error.

Others try to access parts of the site they are not supposed to, images and what not.

Other sites could also be linking incorrectly.. one wrong character and you have an error.



And here is one I did for hubby's tutoring business (the site needs some serious upgrade.. but I thought the error was cute:))

http://techalcove.com/error

[Weedy Lady]

That is a NEAT error page -- having raised a whole big bunch of kids missing socks are near and dear to my heart. We had a whole laundry basket full of "singles"!

On accessing information about which pages are causing the errors, unfortunately once you use a 404 page of your own that statistic is no longer available. I used to use the 404 error list to check my links, etc. Can't do it anymore. It's a trade off that I don't like. But I thought I'd do the error page thing again in hopes that it would encourage people to stay on my site.

If I pay extra I can get the "from" stats for my error page, and I may just do that. It's only about $5 a month extra and is probably worth it. My basic hosting fee is pretty low and as far as I can tell the stats are fairly accurate -- at least compared to other stats from other hosts I've used in the past.

[Conficio]

Originally Posted by Weedy Lady

"To redirect to your home page is also not nice to your fellow webmasters, who linked to you site."

I have now posted an error page that is actually an error page, with a request for people to visit my site and if they wish, to let me know which page they couldn't get. Is this better? If not, what should I do to make it right?

Weedy Lady,
that looks great! I think it serves your visitors well.

Originally Posted by Weedy Lady

My stats are showing an enormous number of 404's, and yet my html editor doesn't find any missing or broken links. How is this?

Could it be that you deleted pages or moved them to different directories (names)?

This is something we all feel, we can do at will, don't we? But it is not a good idea. The Internet has been invented by academics. Do you know how academic papers work? You write about a little and quote much from others to back up your finding or opinion. The quotes must use proper references to each document cited, it's author and the page.

That is how in effect the hyper linking works. Now imagine, many authors would change their documents constantly and move content from page 8 to page 41, or remove content all together. It would all collapse, or in the Internet world it it produces 404 error pages in enormous number(s). Add to the papers referencing each other, all the shoe boxes of full of index cards to prepare for writing a paper (I mean the Bookmark lists in each browser) and you can imagine where the 404 error pages come from.

The short end is, try to leave content where it is. If you feel you need to reorganize, annotate the old pages, as outdated, and redirect with a delay to the new page. In addition you should track all referers (links from other sites to this page) and ask their web-master to update the link. If the ballast of the old pages really gets to heavy, you can look at your logs, which pages don't get any traffic anymore and start deleting those.

Of course edit content that is changing, like contact addresses, phone numbers, latest news, .... However leave the URL to find these topics the same.

I hope I could enlighten the audience some more. By the way, access to the full (raw) logs should not cost any extra. Having an additional feature on the graphical log statistics from your ISP might.

Have a nice day
K<o>

[Weedy Lady]

Thanks -- glad you approve of the new 404 page. I tried to keep it looking like the rest of the site, and in the same "rhyming" spirit.

Thanks for all your advice and comments also. I never remove a page, nor do I move it to other directories. I do use automatic redirects for pages that are no longer being used, and sometimes I redo a page completely if the url is not too unrelated to the new content.

Almost all of my 404's were typing mistakes, but about every other month I really would find a broken link, and since I take broken links VERY seriously it was an important tool for me, even if I did have to go through thousands of entries to find the couple that were meangingful. What the heck, I'm retired, so can work full time at this hobby, eh?

Thanks again for your assistance and comments.

[useratl]

Originally Posted by EJRS.COM

What do you think of my custom error page? http://reelinthefish.net/ok

I LOVE your error page!!

However, you might want to indicate 'click on the fish to see more of the site', or you may lose some casual surfers . . .

[EJRS.COM]

Coool thanks for that tip. You are a blessing. Have a great day. You gonna share yr error pages?

[sijpie]

Weedy Lady,

I used to have loads of 404s as well, due to the way the site (www.broekhuizen.me.uk) was set up. I use one asp script for the main site page, and depending on a appended variable (the year) it picks the css sheet and the various graphics that need displaying. For some years the background graphic of one of the inline frames is empty, and this caused the 404. Nothing to worry about, but it does mask the more serious 404s you want to catch.

[PitterPA]

Loved all the error pages. Until a couple days ago, I never knew custom error pages existed. So of course I had to have one too :)

www.pitterpa.com/404.shmtl

You could spend hours looking at these

[matauri]

Might want to correct a typo here Pitta...

Even thought the link you're searching for doesn't exist,

[paulhiles]

Thought I would just add the following site to the thread.
404 Research Lab

The site features a gallery of 404 pages, WPW members may even like to add their own!
one of my faves from there is this one...
http://www.lucidcircus.com/error.html
not a particularly user friendly example, but it certainly captures that whole missing page... black hole kinda feel! :o)

Paul

[hilary]

http://www.clutteredlife.com/404

:)

[welsh_whisper]

I thought I'd help Bush & Blair track down those pesky middle-eastern weapons - so I typed "weapons of mass destruction" into google and clicked "I'm feeling lucky". This is what it came up with....

http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/