Research e-Labs

Almost every web user will have encountered a ‘404 - Not Found’ error at some point. After reading an interesting discussion topic started by Ben Bradshaw on the Web Standards Wiki about 404 good practice I decided to fix our site’s 404 error page.

You can view the discussion at http://webstandards.govt.nz/index.php/Talk:Handling_404s.

Our original error page wasn’t awful - it kept our page look and feel and had the site navigation down the right-hand side. But it gave no help to users on how to find the page they were looking for.

To improve the page I followed Ben’s suggestions and added some instructions to help visitors find what they were looking for. I also removed the 404 error as this is irrelevant to users trying to find a page.

To check out the new and improved 404 page see http://research.elabs.govt.nz/nonexistantpage.

In addition to the instructions on the page, we’ve made it smarter by attempting to guess where the user was trying to get based on the URL. Inspired by this Housing New Zealand Corporation 404 page we set up a similar page where a site search will be performed from the page name in the URL and results displayed under a ‘Suggestions’ heading.

See some examples in action:
http://research.elabs.govt.nz/research (searches for ‘research’)
http://research.elabs.govt.nz/category/web-service (searches for ‘web service’)

The algorithm is very simple:

1. get the page name from the URL e.g. http://research.elabs.govt.nz/somepath/somepage.ext
2. replace any underscores or dashes with spaces
3. decode any encoded characters e.g. %20 will become a space
4. search and display under suggestions (if there no results nothing is displayed)

If you have any suggestions, improvements, or examples of better practice please leave us a comment.

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Tags: best practice, web

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm under Standards & Compliance. You can leave a response, or trackback from your site.