But you’ve gotta love it when a website takes the time to makes their 404 error page enjoyable.

Everything about the IMDb is wonderful. The features, the trivia, the ability to settle every late night argument I have with friends. And the Amazon-owned site has even found a way to make messing up fun.

If you happen to mistype a IMDb URL into your browser, you’ll be greeted with quotes from classic movies featured in the database. All of the quotes have some relevance to the fact that you’ve landed on a page that cannot be found, but some have had to be altered just a little bit.

In the last 12 hours, a redditor “accidentally found, and fell in love with, IMDb’s 404 page.” And if you’ve yet to do that for yourself, check out this non-existent IMDb page.

Or, you can check out all of the different 404 messages below. After some serious refreshing, I think I’ve found all of the ones that IMDb currently offers:

From The Shawshank Redemption:

From The Wizard of Oz:

From True Lies:

From The Big Lebowski:

From Cool Hand Luke:

From Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope:

From Airplane!:

From Lost (TV series):

From The Muppet Movie:

Not sure if this is better than The Rolling Stones’ cheeky 404 page, but it’s pretty damn cool.

But in a world overpopulated with clever (and not-so-clever) error pages, this might be my favorite.

If you come across a non-existent page over at The Rolling Stones’ official website, Mick and the boys will calmly let you know that you can’t always get what you want – complete with a video of the famous song and all:

The video is a live performance from 2003 at London’s Twickenham Stadium. Of course, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is one of the most revered track in rock history, having first appeared in 1969 on the Stones’ seminal album Let it Bleed. Yesterday, the band celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first concert ever – July 12th, 1962 at The Marquee Club in London.

Thanks for the life lesson, Mick.

[via Laughing Squid]

Searchers despise the 404 error page, especially when it comes from clicking what looks like a relevant link in a list of search results. Too often, these 404s come up as an ineffective default page in the browser, leaving the visitor no other real choice but to hit the Back button and try again.

One may end up leery of future results from that domain, a brutal blow to a webmaster who may not realize without carefully checking the log files that people are hitting and missing something on their sites.

The biggest search engine, Google, prefers not to see this. It not only diminishes the value of the destination sites returning a 404 error, but the quality of its search results. A poorly configured delivery of 404 results may keep an otherwise dead page alive in Google’s index, to be found again and again.

It’s basic stuff, as commenters on the first of a short series of posts at the Google Webmaster Central blog noted. Is someone really a webmaster if they don’t know to return a 404 error when a page is not found?

Not all 404s are created equal, as Maile Ohye said at the blog today. A 404 could be a soft error or a hard one.

The soft 404 response is the undesirable result. This happens when someone tries to visit a nonexistent URL on a site. Instead of an error page, the website returns a 200 response code and sends the request to the site’s homepage.

On the user’s side, the person who encountered this probably questioned the sanity of the webmaster on the other end who let this useless result happen. It’s not a good way to earn repeat visits.

Give the visitor a real 404 page not found result, Ohye said. It’s a clear indication both to human and automated visitors about the status of the page.

Google plans to make a week of the 404, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of where they are going judging by Ohye’s comment about sending a helpful “Not found” message to the viewer. Webmasters have the ability to deliver any kind of page in response to a 404 situation.

Such a page could let the visitor know that, while the page they wanted isn’t there, other pages on the site may be exactly what they need. Weather.com demonstrates this well: this link brings up two types of content.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/the-joy-of-404-ing-2008-08/feed 3 http://www.webpronews.com/live-search-rolls-out-404-help-2008-06 http://www.webpronews.com/live-search-rolls-out-404-help-2008-06#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:06:01 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=45704 Microsoft offers webmasters a new toolkit to help them create dynamic 404 pages that can help get visitors back on track if they hit a dead end on a site.

Few things frustrate site visitors more than finding an error page where they expected to find useful content. The default 404 page that browsers encounter offers little more than an apology about the failure.

Many websites have shifted how they present the 404 page in recent years. They use the 404 to help the visitor get back on track, even going so far as to turn the experience into a little branding opportunity.

Microsoft wants to help more sites make their 404 pages useful when encountered. Their Live Search team tackled the page not found problem, and came up with their Web Page Error Toolkit.

They said the Toolkit, a customizable web application, looks at the keywords from a search that led to the 404 page. It returns a list of search results that may help the visitor get what they wanted to find. More on that from the Windows Live Dev blog:

The Toolkit is a customizable ASP.net application that replaces the default error page on your IIS server. The Toolkit enables you to use Live Search (or any search engine) to return results for the specified domain and locale, control the number of results returned on your page, choose whether to offer spelling corrections, and customize your error message.

You also have the option of choosing from several keyword extraction strategies that are included with the install, or providing your own implementation.

A mistake leading to a 404 does not have to be the end of someone’s experience with a website. Good implementations of this kind of get-back-on-track strategy could even turn a lost visitor into a converting customer, making the Toolkit worth a look for site publishers.

One of the better examples of a site giving its visitors a chance to get back on track resides at the Weather Channel’s website.  It’s a mini homepage that lets people know that, while their original request cratered on arrival, they can still get to forecasts, web search, and other links and services at Weather.com.

Some sites take the idea of spiffing up the 404 page to greater heights. The Royal Pingdom blog showed 17 examples of this today, ranging from flowcharts to President Bush to cut-up magazine text ransom notes.

One of the worst 404 examples comes from one of the best known tech companies out there. Google’s 404 page simply says Not Found, and does not even link back to Google.com.

To be fair, there was a good deal of separation between the original filing and the completion of its request; Amazon filled out all the paperwork on August 5, 2003, and only received the patent yesterday.  Also, as far as we know, no string of lawsuits has been filed as a result.

We’ll let you look at the patent abstract (hat tip to Slashdot) and judge its validity for yourself, however.

So it’s more or less a way of directing users from nonworking Web pages to similar functional ones.  Clever, but not as original as we’d like.  Also, it seems to depend on letting Amazon crawl around inside one’s computer.

This is hardly the first instance of Amazon-related patent craziness, though; past instances include its patent on one-click shopping and another one covering the inclusion of search strings in URLs.

Other people run into that frustration, and according to monitoring site Pingdom, they are hitting it a lot in the top 100 websites as ranked by Alexa traffic.

“Curious about how the big players on the web were handling this, we tested the 404 error pages for all the top 100 websites in the US and found that almost one in four had an inadequate 404 error page. Sinners include Google, Match.com, YouTube, Blogger, Megaupload and many more,” Pingdom noted in their post.

Webmasters can do a better job with their 404 pages. Instead of just bringing the visit to an abrupt end, like Match.com does with a blank page, the 404 offers an opportunity to provide the visitor with a reason to stay on the site and look around rather than hitting the Back button automatically.

Pingdom particularly liked what Weather.com does with its 404 results. Weather.com identifies itself, has links to its other services, and provides a search option to find weather forecasts. It’s much better than another 404 laggard, Google, which tosses out branded page not found error 404s.

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On average, what do you usually do first when you hit one of those pages: Immediately click your browser’s “back” button so that you can try somewhere else. Try to edit the URL you’re attempting to visit and then see if you can head back a step and work your way to where you want to go. Write an email to the web designer of the website to inform them of the issue that you’ve spotted while navigating their site.

Let me guess what your answer was: You click the “back” button on your web browser. If you’re like the majority of web users, then that’s precisely what you answered. Most of us don’t even realize that there are any other options out there than to go back to where we started.

Therefore, it would be awfully nice to be able to help this type of visitor to get back to your website in case they’ve landed on an old link or have entered your URL improperly. You can edit and customize your own 404 File Not Found page so that it gives them the directions that they need so that they can get back to your site and find what they want.

Of course, there are a few things that you’ll need to have available to you if you want to customize that 404 File Not Found page. The first, and most important, is that you need to have a web host that enables you to edit that part of your website. Some will, but some will not. Before getting started, find out from your web host if they will make that option available to you. To find out, look into your hosting documentation and see if they mention anywhere the ability to customize or edit a file named “.htaccess”. If so, it will likely mean that you are able to customize your 404 File Not Found.

If your web host does permit you to edit the 404 File Not Found, then you’re ready to get started. The following are the steps that you will need to follow:

Create/Modify your .htaccess file – this might not always be necessary, but for some web hosts, it’s required. If you don’t need it, then skip this step. If your server isn’t an Apache web server, however, you’ll need to ask your web host what you need to do to have the server serve your edited file when a file on your domain can’t be found. Otherwise, you simply need to add the following line to your “.htaccess” file:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

With that done, you’ll need to create a notfound.html in your main web directory. This will be what tells the Apache web server that when it can’t find a file, then it should use that URL.

It only takes one .htaccess file in your main directory to cover your entire site and all of its sub-directories. However, if you want specific sub-directories to show their own 404 File Not Found messages, then you will have to create a separate one in each directory. The .htaccess file in any directory or subdirectory will override any other .htaccess files you have in any other directory or subdirectories.

Create the error file – now it’s time to customize your 404 File Not found page. Let the visitor know that the link is not functioning, but don’t stop there. Provide the visitor with alternatives. This should include a link to your main page. If you have a search engine on your website, this would be the ideal place to put a query box. This will make your visitor’s experience very simple because now they can simply type in what they want and they’ll be sent there. If you don’t have a search engine on your website – or even if you do – you might want to place a link to your site map, allowing your visitors to easily find what they want from the list. The point is simply to make sure that your visitor doesn’t give up on you and head somewhere else.

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Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com , where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

Refco’s CEO has been arrested, and while his innocence or guilt remains to be determined, Refco provides us with an excellent opportunity to understand the serious interdependencies between IT and Sarbanes Oxley compliance.

Some background: Refco went public in August, 2005, and was warmly received by the market despite the fact that its auditors noted deficiencies in its internal controls and financial staff. Per the Sarbanes Oxley Act, these deficiencies would need to be rectified as Refco complied with disclosure rules set by the SEC. However, before that cycle could even commence, an internal auditor discovered the notorious alleged $430 bad debt. What the auditor actually found was the receipt of an interest payment from a client that appeared to be too high for the actual loan balance that the client was carrying. An experienced auditor observing the Refco disaster in the press stated that finding such a discrepancy in a company the size of Refco was not like “finding a needle in a haystack” it was like “find a needle in a stack of needles.”

Indeed, “finding a needle in a stack of needles” shows the challenge of designing and enforcing sound internal controls at a public company. In order to comply with Sarbanes Oxley Section 404, the management of a public company must attest to the existence of internal controls. Ideally, those controls need to be good enough to assure accurate financial statements. If the internal controls are not good enough, then the company can suffer a variety of fates, including costly SOX remediation, loss of investor confidence, SEC punishments, shareholder lawsuits, and more. The stakes are quite high, as Refco’s dramatic collapse shows.

How then, can a public company institute internal controls that can find needles amongst needles? Invariably, internal controls are derived in large part from the IT systems that support the business transactions that are subject to those controls. Controls are not only about IT, but there is IT in virtually all significant internal controls. This makes for good news and bad news from a SOX perspective. Distinguishing good needles from bad needles requires sophisticated, real time correlation of data between multiple systems. This is a major IT challenge.

Well designed, well-implemented, and well-maintained IT solutions can deliver critical components of effective internal controls. Poorly designed and maintained IT can hamper internal controls. As many public companies have found in the last two years, IT is the wellspring of many true compliance headaches. To add confusion to the mix, the IT industry has added its quota of noise and overblown solutions to the SOX process. Some SOX software solutions are excellent. Some are not so good. Others are incomplete. Any software package that claims to be “SOX Compliant” – as if there were some kind of Underwriters’ Laboratory certification for SOX, is making an over-hyped claim. There is no such thing. What should be done about this?

Finding the IT solution to Sarbanes Oxley is a subjective, complex matter, but one in which any serious public company must involve itself. While every company’s compliance situation is different, several underlying factors will be constant: To achieve compliance, IT, accounting, and line of business managers will need to work together more closely than they ever have before. They will have to work through a number of challenging, integrated business process, control, audit, and IT issues to be successful. It is not easy, but it is worth doing. Once tackled, the integrated IT and business issues required for SOX compliance should lead to improved operations and control over financial reporting.

VP of Marketing at SOA Software – www.soa.com hugh.taylor@soa.com

Tunisia joins China, Brazil, Iran, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as one of the chief critics of the United States government’s insistence upon maintaining the role of “steward” of the Internet.

Many of these countries, however, are not without their share of criticism in the matter, as many feel their thoughts on the matter are moot until they address their own issues of Internet censorship and tight Web regulations.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is one such organization especially critical of China and Iran, for their history of human rights abuses that have extended to online realms. Recently RSF blasted the UN’s decision to hold the upcoming summit in Tunisia, where freedom of speech and press are limited.

In a statement to the UN, RSF said the decision to host an Internet summit in “a country that imprisons people for using the Internetis beyond comprehension,” a poignant detail many feel is an excellent example why the UN should not be granted any regulatory control.

This is one of many reasons the United States Department of Commerce has no interest in divesting regulatory control of the 13 root servers the government spent years and copious amounts of money developing. The US government has yet to even cede control to its own Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organization it created for that purpose in 1998.

Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, outlined four principles guiding US control over the Internet, the first of which addresses the government’s commitment to ensuring the stability and security of the Web.

Releasing regulatory control of the Internet to an intergovernmental body poses a number of implications the US government is uncomfortable with, one of which may be construed as a decrease in sovereignty, as shifting this control would lessen US strength as a global power.

The main objection, however, as voiced by Gallagher, is an apparent commitment to ensuring that the Internet be driven by the private sector, rather than by governmental influence. That is, unless, that governmental influence is from the government that financed the endeavor to begin with.

But David Gross, the State Dept.’s coordinator for international communications and information policy, has for sealed the issue with a few pointed words.

“We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet,” he said Thursday. “Some countries want that. We think that’s unacceptable.”