Confessions of an Undercover Geek

For work, I have started taking a looking at usable error messages on the web.

Like, what happens when you go to a web site and you type in a wrong URL? What type of page are you presented with?  What different options are you presented with to really get to what you are looking for?  Often you will see a “404.”  404 is the server code in http that says a page could not be found.  But what does 404 mean to joe bloe user?

Both Jakob Nielsen and Site Point lay down some guidelines for how to make better web error pages.  One thing that I was looking for was a page that was not overly complicated.  It should easily lay out my options for where I can go to find what I am looking for.

Here are some of the better “page not found” error pages that I could find.

• Yahoo!
• Washington Post
• University of Wisconsin

Here are some not so good “page not found” pages.

• New York Times
• Microsoft
• University of Michigan

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