Avoid the dreaded “Page Not Found” error on Your website
Friday, August 6th, 2010While no good web site is ever quite finished as we’re always focused on what current and new content is on it, handling what’s NOT on your site is also crucial.
A web site is a fluid medium, which makes it the ideal information bridge between a business and its audience. Content can be changed and updated constantly with new information, and the organization of the information can be restructured easily as things evolve. If you’ve been online for many years, you’ve probably made changes to the organization of your site and possibly even the platform it runs on (and if you haven’t yet, you will eventually). What’s more, there is nothing that search engines love so much as new content, and honestly, constantly creating new content is just the sort of thing that will keep people coming back to your site.
This puts a high premium on what content you have on your web site – possibly to the point that you forget what is NOT, or more accurately, is no longer on, your site. That is, as your site evolves, content and navigation changes, it’s redesigned and possibly even completely reengineered on a new platform, you are inevitably going to leave some folks facing the dreaded 404 Error: Page Not Found experience. There’s no avoiding it really; it’s going to happen.