December 29, 2000
Lost and found.
Useful “Page Not Found” Error Pages
If you’re even the slightest bit concerned about the experience viewers have when visiting your humble excuse for a site, take heed. The last thing some poor, unsuspecting sod should ever see is a 404 message. No matter how careful you’ve been to redirect obsolete pages, support ancient, if not quirky, browser behaviour, and purge the residual linkrot from the dwindling ranks of the search engine elite, somebody somewhere will end up having a keyboard seizure and type a creatively obtuse and completely invalid path to your site. Every web server in existence has some means to allow customization of the humble “file not found” error message. Why some sites still insist on returning generic error pages is beyond me. How hard is it to add a link back to your home page or at the very least a freaking email address so the user, who is now probably now in some state of wtf, can contact you regarding the spurious, accidental message they have just witnessed? Looking for prime-time examples of this inconsiderate technical oversight in action? Try CNN, Hewlett-Packard, and FedEx for starters.
There is absolutely no excuse for this.
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