Design vs Art Blog

Creating a custom "page not found" web page is the proper way of handling wrong or outdated web addresses. Give information to your users, use a simple design and tell your visitors that the URL does not exists any more.

"tell them that the page is not available anymore"

Please avoid to tell users that they are wrong or that they have a "bad" web address. Just tell them that the page is not available anymore and give them a link to your homepage.

Ikea, the furniture maker, has a simple, good looking and informative page not found web page design.

On the other side, the Cartoon Network website does not have a customized 404 Not Found message. This could be very frustrating for users but it is also bad for the website business, I can imagine that many users don’t have idea what such a message means and they leave the site. Cartoon Network:

Popularity: 6% [?]

Login process should be extremely easy as this is they way users will get into the personalized content of your website. Many users get tired and leave if they try to login a few times and they can not get into the website. Specially new users leave and don’t come back.

Avoid unnecessary information or distractions. 9rules, the social content network, tells users that the password will be emailed when the are at the login page. This is confusing as usually sites don’t send emails during the login process.

Making a mistake introducing the username or password takes users to the signup page. In this particular case, this is really bad as no error message or password recovery link are displayed. If you want to improve usability and your general web design, I would recommend, first to nicely tell the user that there was a mistake, and after that give an easy way to solve the problem (in this example would be a “try again” or “recover login info”)

Popularity: 9% [?]