Thursday, January 17, 2008, 8:50pm
Leverage Your 404 Page Traffic
A lot of people put very little thought into their 404 page while others put in a great deal of effort into making their error pages either funny, informative, or both. I’m not one to talk right now, but for every client I work with I make sure to provide an effective 404 page aligned to the goals of their site.
What does this mean? If conversion and website sales are amain goal of the website, a 404 page could direct visitors to the products and services they probably wanted to see. On a blog, providing search results based on the URL is a very clever way of helping your visitors out.
While there are plug-ins for WordPress that provide this type of functionality (here’s one), often including a custom 404 template will give you the greatest amount of flexibility. Here’s a quick example for WordPress users:
Place that at the top of your 404.php WordPress template page and then iterate through The Loop as you would normally. Without much effort, you probably just saved your users some detective work when coming to your site. This concept is especially useful if you’ve changed the Permalink structure on your blog since it launched.
Picture by willem velthoven.
