Hitting a dead end page is pretty disappointing, you search, your find and you click eagerly expecting to see what your looking for. To be shown a basic 404 error is pretty frustrating after all your hard work.

HTTP – 404 Page Not Found
Sorry, the page you were looking for cannot be found.


What Are Website Design 404 Page Errors
Most clients will not understand what a 404 page is will assume your website is down, you not finished the website or you or no longer trading. We have started to implement on both our Website Design and Ecommerce Web Design projects specific 404 page designs to make this annoying little aspect a bit more fun, and to reassure / help your clients to find what they are looking for.

When Do Website Design 404 Page Errors Happen?
A 404 page error will appear when a browser tries to access a page that no longer exists on your website. This can happen a few ways. If you are thinking of a Website Redesign for instance, you may have 400 pages listed on Google and if you move your website platform to say WordPress which allows you to integrate a blog and social media much more seamlessly your URL’s (website page names) will change.

Before:
www.yourdomain.co.uk/ecommerce_web_design_help.html

After:
www.yourdomain.co.uk/ecommerec_web_design/help

You can find out how many of your pages are listed on Google by performing this simple search:

pages: www.yourdomain.co.uk

Google needs to understand what has changed, we write a simple HTACCESS script that sits on your server account which lists all the old website design page names and points them to the new page names for the new website redesign. You can see you need to be very careful when editing page names in your CMS (content management system).

Broken Link Checker
You also need to be very careful when you hard code links into your website pages. These are links manually added to the page content that link to other parts of your website. Again if you change names of have a website redesign they will no longer work. Google doesn’t link broken links on your website and it can have a negative effect on your search engine optimisation and your search engine positions rankings. We use plug-ins inside WordPress to highlight any broken pages for blogs which can be very hard to track and use Google Analytic to monitor the 404 error pages.

Website Design 404 Error Pages
It is also wise to include a sitemap / website page links to help your lost visitors to find their way. Its nice to be helped.

Here are some great designs that give us inspiration….and a few laughs.

Please send over any ideas for other good 404 pages.

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