This
is almost always a design, usability, or accessibility issue, and the web designer is
accountable.
In either case, it??™s the corporation??™s responsibility to fix the problem. Until the problem is
resolved, however, plan for the unplanned and ensure that your site has effective failsafe
options built into the architecture. This chapter will cover several aspects of contingency
management, from building smart error pages and intelligible search results to proper
page-printing techniques to making sure you have a doomsday page ready to go in the
case of a total domain meltdown.
Redirects and error pages
To draw a rough analogy, a website is like a system of roads. There are several main highways,
some smaller bypasses and shortcuts, a bunch of sideshow attractions, and a forest
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of signs telling people where to go. Wandering off the beaten path will often land visitors
in the middle of an unfriendly error page, most of which seem to have been designed by
system administrators too busy fragging each other in Quake to write server messages with
plain language.
Pages:
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