Take advantage of your ’404-Not Found’ page
Posted on 22. Sep, 2009 by Nikos in Online Shopping, Web Development
There are so many reasons to visit a ’404-Not found’ page: a wrong or expired link, a misspelling etc. How companies use this ‘opportunity’ to contact their website’s visitor. When someone lands on a 404-Not Found pages expects to find content. Is it logical to serve him one sentence that says: “Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found.”
Someone has to drive him in the right place and by this I mean pages as sitemap, store, member registration etc. Each company has to take advantage of this page and drive the visitor where it wants. Especially for the eCommerce websites or online stores, companies have to keep the visitor and drive him where they want. There are several good and bad examples that I found on the web.
Hewlett Packard has a great 404-Not Found page. There is a search form, the four major product categories and many links at the bottom of the page. There is no way that visitor will leave this page.
New York Times has a landing page that drive people to the Member Center. This is how they make money and this is why they care about.
The landing page of Macy’s could be much better. Their main goal is to drive visitors to the homepage but why not directly to the product categories as HP does?
Citibank has a complicated 404 page. The user can either search what he wants or to use the drop-down menus at the very right. Bank of America has a much better way to do it.
The 404-Not Found page of Microsoft is weird. If someone writes: www.microsoft.com/windoWWs goes to Bing results for Windowws and after 3 seconds he will be redirected to Bing.com website. But I visited Microsoft and not Bing and I care about Windows or Office and not about results of ‘Windows’ in Bing.com
Do you have any good or bad examples of 404-Not Found page? BTW this is my favorite one! (Get in the train!)
Leave a reply