It is good practise to have your own customised error page, which is in your own template look and feel, as this provides a consistent user experience and allows you to communicate a suitable message; whilst being in control of that message. Additionally if you don’t create a formal process for errors of this nature you may risk how well your site is perceived by search engines.

Most search engine optimisation and usability experts will recommend you have a customised error page that makes some apology to the user, explains in basic terms what has happened, and suggests some useful and popular content or pages to visit as an alternative. Tip: Don’t reference “404″ in the page content as it is meaningless to the user.

Here’s what we do, which seems to work for us :

Example of a customised error page

Whilst all of this is professional and does something to rescue a poor user experience; for a commercial website, this is a missed opportunity. Make the most of your error pages by turning what could have potentially been a poor user experience into a commercial opportunity by creating a commercial error page.

Tips for Creating a Commercial Error Page

1. Start by doing some simple analysis into your most popular products and pages with highest conversion rates.

2. Do your research first, and if your are a new site, wait a couple of months to get some statistically meaningful performance data.

3. Don’t just put your most expensive products on the page, as this may look hollow and may not convert at all. Wait until you have some interaction and conversion rate data beforehand.

4. Identify top 3 to 10 products and present them in the error page content.

5. Identify top converting pages and explain what these pages are, asking if they might be of interest to the user.

6. Put your search box on your error page.

7. Optimise your error page by testing performance of different products.

8. Analyse the visitor route to error and see if there is a pattern or commercial inference to be made.

Here’s the best commercialised error page I’ve ever seen.

Best Commercial Error Page We Have Seen

Note the friendly and apologetic intro, the huge search box in prominent position, and the placement of the trendy, popular and celebrity-fave footwear items. This brand is working hard to make me like them and to get my business.

It’s worth saying that I was surprised to find a huge number of giants in online retail with a lot of opportunity to increase commercial usability and user experience, by improving on their current solution. Such as ASOS and their automatic redirect to the homepage , Argos and their complete lack of customisation and possibly the biggest surprise of all was Amazon and their slightly formal and completely non-commercial message; which for a web retail giant like Amazon, could be a considerable bit of scooping up to be done. (As you have gathered, I didn’t need to look past ‘A’ to find a surprising amount of missed opportunity.)

Automatic re-direct to home

Er... Where Am I?

Mal Function

Kudos to Zappos for leading the field. Do please let me know if you come across any really good or really bad error pages in the comments!

1. Ensure your site will load without the ‘www’ prefix.

Ensure your .ht access file captures URL type-ins without the ‘www’. Unless ‘told’ otherwise, any URL entry should resolve to ‘www’ as a matter of course. Failure to make this simple change could result in users thinking that your site is down, broken, or over-capacity – none of which look particularly welcome or professional and mean you may have lost a potential customer.

2. Ensure your logo defaults to ‘home’.

When a function becomes a common convention; such as clicking on the website logo taking you to the homepage, this then feeds audience expectation. So much so, that we often use a website logo to go back to the home page rather than any other navigation convention, as the logo tends to be the biggest, brightest (and therefore quickest) single-click route home. It is essential to adopt this practise, as users may seek to re-orient themselves within your content, starting again from the homepage, if they do not find the content they sought on first attempt.

3. Clear and consistent navigable element

What good is all that excellent content, surrounded by beautiful ad modules if nobody can find it? Even if you get lots of traffic from search engines (have good Search Engine Optimisation) – you won’t be encouraging repeat visits or further tours through your content unless you have a clear primary navigation element which remains in the same place throughout the site. Best-practise sites nearly always have a horizontal primary navigation element, with second and third level navigation being on a left hand side menu. It is not compulsory to have your navigation like everyone else; the most important thing is consistency.

4. Clickable breadcrumb

A breadcrumb trail shows the user their path through your site and content. Many Content Management Systems will automatically generate a breadcrumb for you by picking up the page title and its position in the content hierarchy to display a simple trail. Additionally, if a user has arrived at a content page on your site via an external link or a web search, a quick glance at the breadcrumb gives the user an immediate picture of where they are and may encourage an extended visit if the original content was relevant and of interest.

5. Font size 12pt minimum or scalable

Web accessibility is the practise of making your website as accessible as possible to as many people, including those with physical impairment. Web accessibility is a considerable separate topic in itself, and as well as the legal and ethical obligations to ensure your website is as accessible to all as possible, there are very good business reasons to do so as well. If there is one single accessibility tip for increasing your revenue potential, it is to ensure your content is at least 12pt or can be scaled. According to the RNIB at least 2 million of the UK population are visually impaired, which is a significant consideration as a percentage of your customer base. Ensuring that your primary content is at least 12pt, preferably scaling larger, will ensure that you are not discounting this community.

7. Add a searchbox

Adding a searchbox is one of the single biggest wins for any website seeking to improve incremental revenues. If you are an e-commerce site (regardless of how simple and logical your navigation) users tend to favour a searchbox, rather than a directory, to find the product they seek. If you generate revenues from adverts on your content pages, adding a searchbox will allow you to surface relevant content more often. Again here, providing a free-text entry search box promotes a quicker route from intent, to content and the more relevant the content to the user query, the more relevant any ad or product content should be.

8. Searchbox look and feel

Regardless of whether your search box is a direct source of revenue (search results contain products or ads) or an indirect source of revenue (search results contain content pages with complementary advertising – therefore raising ad impressions), there are a set of look and feel practises to adhere to which promote greater and more successful use of the search facility.

• Make the searchbox a minimum of 26 characters wide (not high) and for e-commerce sites between 26 and 50   characters is optimal. Our Yahoo! experience tells us that bigger is better – as user queries become more sophisticated and ‘query string’ length increases

• Do not put any text (‘search here…’ ‘put your search here’ etc) in the searchbox as when scanning the page for the searchbox we tend to look for the ‘big white space’. Even allowing for the varying levels of user sophistication pre-filling a searchbox is definitely not necessary and may cause confusion

• Position your search box top right, or top and centre (close to primary navigation) both positions are a conventional best-practise and promote greater search engagement through ease of searchbox identification

Making these simple tweaks to your existing site, or ensuring that these usability foundations are an integral part of any new build, will ensure efficient revenue performance. Improving incremental revenue performance is a quick win and if you are lucky enough to attract hundreds of thousands of page impressions a month, such a win could be considerable. If you’re not on this scale yet, ensuring usable and efficient performance of your commercial website is an important part of getting you there!