Site visitors will get frustrated if they find broken links that lead to error pages, so you want to avoid these as much as possible. However, there are ways you can use an error page to your advantage just in case a user does end up on one.
The tips in this article can help you negate frustration and engage with your site visitors by providing your community with relevant alternatives to the URL they’re attempting to reach.
Provide Information
As you’re most likely using an OC General page to create your error page, you have a lot of space to enter custom content. While you should try to keep it brief, you can use this space to try to guide your site visitors in navigating your site. This may include:
- Instructions and examples of using the site search.
- Contact details for your city or council.
- Where to find your navigation menu and how to use it.
- Information about why they may have received the error, including problems with the URL. You may instruct them to double-check the URL to see if it’s correct.
If you find yourself with too much content, consider using accordions or tabs to break it up into readable chunks.
Link to Popular Pages
You can also use the WYSIWYG Editor to add links to popular pages, services, and the homepage. This may be pages such as your bins and waste pages, events, community services, permit requests, and rate payer information.
Here are some tools you can use:
- Featured Links: Create a group of styled links to add emphasis to popular pages.
- Content Lists: Build a content list based on content labels (for example, the label “404-error”) to display links using the template of your choice. The benefit of this is they can be a dynamic list; you just need to add the content label to the correct page to display them.
- General pages: Use an OC General page with a full width template. With these templates, you can include side panels with links or use the supporting links option.
Embedded Forms
Another useful tool is an embedded OpenForm that site visitors can submit from your error page. This allows you to receive direct feedback and collect more information about what you might need to fix on your site. You can also use a contact form instead.
Here are some questions you might want to include:
- A text field to enter the broken URL
- A choice field to indicate which department or topics the user was looking for
- A text field to provide a message or briefly state what they were trying to find
- A choice field asking if they want to be contacted regarding the issue, with follow-up fields for contact details such as an email address
When building your form, we recommend keeping it short and only asking for the information you need. If you include too many questions, your site visitors will abandon the form just as frustrated as they were going in. We also recommend using a full-width template when embedding a form.