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10.05.09 Creating Custom 404 Pages To Handle Errors  By Anil BatraLast week I wrote about 404 errors and how to track them in your web analytics tool. In this post I am going to look at how various sites are dealing with 404 error messages and provide your 7 ways of handling 404 pages on your site. The best way to handle the 404 error messages is to not have any by properly setting redirects in case of a redesign, proper sitemaps etc. But despite your best efforts there will be cases when your visitors will get the 404 errors so you just have to be prepared. This post will show you how other sites are doing it so that you can decide what will work for you. I looked at few of the top converting online retailers and few others random sites to see how they are handling 404 error messages. Here is what I found • Schwan.com  Schwan.com, the site with the best conversion rate, notifies the visitors that the page does not exist and then provides a link back to the home page. It also keeps the top navigation intact on the 404 page so that the visitors can easily navigate to the other pages on the site.
• FTD.com  FTD.com, does a nice job of providing products recommendations to the visitors on the 404 custom error page. It also shows the top and left navigation on the error page for easy navigation. • Proflowers.com  Proflowers redirects the visitors to the home page of the site. In some cases it displays a message notifying the visitors that the page was not found but in other cases it just redirects the visitors to the home page. Lack of an error message might confuse the visitors who intended to go to a particular page and not the page they were redirected to (home page). Continue reading this article.
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