Easily Overlooked Opportunities to Polish your Brand OnlineYou've probably heard the adage that your brand isn't just your logo or tagline, its every experience people have with your organization. And its true that having a consistent message in everything you do, from the words your staff uses answer the phone to exactly matching your colors on print materials, does pay off in terms of presenting your organization as professional and clear about your mission.
I have been thinking lately about small ways you can extend your organization's brand and personality online that are often overlooked. As always, I get the most excited about those that are fairly inexpensive, not too difficult to execute and that provide a lot of bang for your buck. I've decided to do a small series of these over the next few weeks. Here's the first - a friendly 404 can say a lot about who you are and how much you care about your web site visitors.
404 pagesWhen visitors can't find what they are looking for on your site it can put them off, even though it might be in no way your fault. Its not just good usability to customize your "page not found" page it's also an opportunity to reinforce your messaging and brand.
An
Error 404 page is what your web server will display when the URL in the browser can't be found. Instead of the boring or unfriendly default
"Not Found The requested URL /oops was not found on this server. This document cannot be retrieved" you can help your visitors find what they are looking for on your site.
First you'll need to find out how you access that page (this might be via the hosting company control panel or in your content management system) and then add helpful tips to reorient the user and provide paths to your most popular, important or interesting content. Not only is this more friendly but its a good opportunity to reinforce your messages for the visitor and show them what's available.
What should your 404 include?A friendly message and a search form are good ideas, as is a list of links to major site sections or popular content. At minimum you want to be sure that your site navigation is available on this page or a link to the site home page to help retain and orient visitors on your site.
And if you can add your sitemap, it will help your visitors find what they are looking for and show off all the great stuff on your site.
Ideally you would also include a link to email the webmaster or a form to submit broken links in case it's a bad link on your site that landed them on this page.
Check out how some organizations do this:Whether you go simple with just a nice message and link back home, or get really fancy and try to guess what they were looking for, its a vast improvement over the default error page that can send the wrong message about your organization.
In my opinion, a short statement and bulleted list is most helpful to guide users to their intended information and its best to avoid being too cutesy or clever on these pages. Visitors are already frustrated so reminding them they may have made a mistake or forcing them to read a lot of text probably isn't going to improve their mood or associations with your organization.
More tips and ideas on good 404's And some specifics for some common open source content management systems:
Drupalhttp://www.davebeall.com/Drupal-HowTo/custom-error-pages-drupal Joomla
http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Create_a_Custom_404_Error_Page Plone http://plone.org/documentation/kb/error-handling Wordpresshttp://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_an_Error_404_Page Happy 404'ing
