Jesse Lavery

When I started at Allegheny, we were in the very early stages of migrating from static web pages to WordPress. (In a future post I will be detailing my experience and the lessons I’ve learned in leading that transition.) One of the last things to get my attention was the 404 page template.

I know, given the nature of the transition we were going through, it should have been a focus earlier. Hindsight, y’know?

Goals

I wanted our page to have a little bit of humor, but also be useful. It had to have enough personality to soften the blow of missing content and also provide links and search functionality to (hopefully) get the user to where they intended to go.

Here’s what we did:

Chompers

We’re the Allegheny Gators and Chompers is our mascot. The original plan was to have a more basic photo of Chompers but my colleague Derek got creative. We had a photo of Chompers in front of a “2014″ flag from move-in day last fall. A little photoshop work later and “2014″ became “404″. Awesome!

Links & Search

We’re providing three links:

1. Link to the “Search” box. This search is site-specific; if you’re on the Admissions site, this search box will only search within Admissions. (We also have a “global” search box at the very top of the page that searches the entire Allegheny family of sites.)
2. Link to the site’s home page. Again, if you’re on the Admissions site, this will take you to the Admissions home page. This is done using the home_url() and bloginfo('name') WordPress functions.
3. Link to Allegheny’s home page. If you’re really turned around and just need to start over, this is for you.

Wufoo Reporting

We used Chris Coyier’s excellent tutorial on the Wufoo company blog to add a form to let users report the “page not found” error. In short, there are two hidden fields (“URL with Error” and “Referring URL”) as well as a big ol’ “Comments” field. We haven’t had a lot of reports filed, but the ones we have received have been super helpful.

How’d we do?

It’s hard to measure users’ satisfaction with something like this, but anecdotally, it’s been a success. And purely from the standpoint of the web team fixing errors, the Wufoo reporting has been great.

That said, there’s more we’re going to do – including utilizing a WordPress plugin to report 404′s instead of relying on users’ form submissions. But compared to where we were, this feels good.