This gives the user an immediate, familiar route to find
the page they want, and if the search function works well, it will probably be a
clean fix.
4. Enable feedback: There is a chance that the person is intimately familiar with the
company website, and they really think that the missing page should be there. In
that case, it??™s important to provide a means of contacting the webmaster directly to
report the issue; this can be done through a direct e-mail link or a short form.3
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3. Ian Lloyd wrote a good article for A List Apart called ???The Perfect 404,??? in which he detailed a
method for providing a single button to report the missing page. You can find the article at
www.alistapart.com/articles/perfect404.
Figure 11-2. This 404 page provides an explanation of why the user might have encountered the
error and some means of finding the content they were looking for, plus a link to the contact form
where they can report the missing content.
Once your error page is built, it??™s a simple matter of loading it onto the server. Many CMSs
natively support custom 404 pages inside their engines, but for many websites, an error
page will simply be a static HTML file referenced by the server.
Pages:
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