Web Design ? Even Error Pages Can Bring you Customers

Web Design ? Even Error Pages Can Bring you Customers
I was talking recently to a friend of mine who is a bit of
a web guru. Now I thought that I knew quite a bit about
web design and usage, but maybe I'm not as smart as I
thought.

We were talking about error pages and he told me something
that I had never heard before. "Of course you can
customize your error pages".

I was amazed. He nearly fell off his chair laughing at me
when I said that I always thought those 404 error pages
came from some central internet point beyond my reach and
that they all looked exactly the same.

When he had calmed down a little, he patiently explained
that an there are scores of error codes covering many
different situations. They are all three digits, such as
500 ? Server Error, 408 ? Request Timeout and of course the
familiar 404 ? Not found, which most of us see fairly
regularly.

He went on to say that 404 errors are sometimes caused by
users incorrectly typing in a page name, but quite often it
can be just a communication glitch between one end and the
other and if you hit refresh, you'll usually get right back
on track.

Despite what I thought, the content of error pages does not
come from some omnipotent global hub, some kind of
web-central, but are in fact pages held on the server of
your web host. When an error condition is picked up, the
host simply serves up the error page.

Now that means that you can replace their standard error
pages with something of your own and simply tell the host
to serve that instead. All of which got me to thinking.

What if instead of infuriating my users with a bland
standard page of techno-babble, I gave them something to
make them smile and help them get back on track. My friend
explained that we simply needed to create two files and
upload them to my site.

The first one is the replacement error page itself. I
decided we should give it the same look and feel as the
rest of my site, so we added the banner at the top and some
of the navigation links. Then I entered a cheery message
saying "Oops, sorry ? something's gone wrong. It happens
sometimes, but don't worry, it's not serious. Click here
and we'll have you back on track in no time" Then at the
bottom is a simple link to take people back to my homepage.

If you have a particularly complex site with thousands of
pages, then you might want to lead people to a sitemap
first or give them some category links so they could start
to figure out at least which section they want to get to.

The second file is one called .htaccess. This is a little
text file, which contains a few lines of code telling your
web-host which errors to pick up and which page to show in
which event. Simple. Well simple for my friend anyway,
but he assures me that anyone halfway competent can do it.
In fact he says that your web-host will probably have full
instructions on their help pages.

So what's the point of doing this? Well firstly we're all
impatient with the web and as soon as anything goes wrong
we want to jump off somewhere else. You don't want to lose
your potential customers that way, so this is a chance to
hang on to them, just when they're about to disappear.

Secondly, as any good web marketer knows, any chance that
you have to make a positive impression is worth grabbing.
We spend hours agonizing over the wording of our
autoresponder e-mails in order to ensure that we build a
solid relationship with our prospects, so why can't we also
get a little bit of our friendly personality across on an
error page too.

So take a closer look at your error pages and learn to make
them lovable.

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Andrew Grant is a web entrepreneur, life coach and
marketing consultant. He has written many articles on self
growth and how to build a successful web business. Andrew
publishes a FREE fortnightly newsletter, packed with
valuable information for growing your wealth and growing
your self. To subscribe visit :
http://www.money-and-mind.com
Links to any tools and resources mentioned can be found at :
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