404 Page: Do You Have One?

What the heck is it?

Is that what you’re asking?

A 404 page, according to Wikipedia is described as

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested.

Alrighty then. Now in layman’s terms (aka how Janice describes it).

Have you ever got back a piece of mail from the post office with “Address Unknown: Return to Sender”?

Well, essentially this is the same thing on your site.

It happens when someone follows a link that has since been removed from your site, or if they attempted to type it in from memory and perhaps had a typo.

A 404 page is often one that is left un-branded by the web owner. This is your opportunity to have some fun with it. To help guide them back. That you’ve taken the time to be aware that bad links happen.

Here’s what mine looks like:

And here’s what one of my client’s looks like:

You can see that there is the opportunity to use your own voice. There are also a lot of other creative ones out there.

A way that you can test to see if you have one on your site is to type in your URL into your web browser followed by a forward slash ” / ” and then a random bunch of characters that you know is not a real page.

It could look something like:

cowgirlupwebdesign.com/iwafhoi3

If you don’t have one, speak to your web developer about getting one.

CowgirlUp!