Error Page Idea
Photo credit: Alexandre Galant
While blog hopping my favorite blogs, I found a good post over at my good friend Nicole Dean’s blog. By the way, Nik is a great writer (and blogger) she always makes me smile if not laugh out loud. Anyway, Nicole was talking about using your 404 Error pages wisely which I totally agree. I recently spent some time doing up some of our sites’ error pages including this one but like her, I bet there are some sites that slip through the crack.
Then it occured to me, maybe all that’s needed is just a better way to manage these pesky error pages. Now I’m not trying to complicate something simple, but just maybe, I would be better at this if I could easily change, track and do this from one place.
Please excuse any flaws or SEO boo-boos if any I’m kinda thinking out loud here. Maybe, if I could group similar sites together. I’d create an offer that would work well for all sites in that group then either iframe or PHP include the offer / squeeze page in the error page. That way, updating offers won’t be so much work. Update from one place and it gets changed on all sites.
I know you can’t do this for every site and on some sites, you need more custom pages, but mini sites, sites that aren’t your anchor brands… this just might work. Thoughts? How do you manage your error pages across web sites? Do you have any bright ideas how to better manage them all? Please do share.
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On one of my sites I created an errorpage similar to the one shown in Nicole Dean’s post, just not so good looking and well structured.
It also included links to the main categories as well as to the most visited pages on my site. Internal referals from that page to content pages are there so it helped in reducing abandonment rate.
The idea about iframing an offer into the errorpage is great – will follow up with that tip.
On one of my sites I created an errorpage similar to the one shown in Nicole Dean’s post, just not so good looking and well structured.
It also included links to the main categories as well as to the most visited pages on my site. Internal referals from that page to content pages are there so it helped in reducing abandonment rate.
The idea about iframing an offer into the errorpage is great – will follow up with that tip.
Hey Santa. I need to schedule some time to work this in – take my own advise. Let us know if you do it and if it works OK.
Hey Santa. I need to schedule some time to work this in – take my own advise. Let us know if you do it and if it works OK.