

A good example of why nice error pages matter - Lightbody
http://blog.browsermob.com/2009/12/cyber-monday-final-results-amazon-the-big-winner-borders-and-kohls-stumble/

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baxter
Upvoted because I think this is a good point, but the statement "nice error
pages matter" isn't backed up with any evidence. I would have loved it if
there had been statistics showing how people reacted to different error
messages, even though I know that kind of information might be difficult to
gather.

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potatolicious
I would be interested in this as well - but IMHO the effort involved in
putting up something other than plaintext error (like Borders) is so trivial
that it's practically a crime to not do it.

I think it's hard to argue that there isn't _some_ gain to be had with a
proper error page - and implementation is just so darned simple.

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Lightbody
Agreed. I'd also argue that the "cuteness" of such an error page actually can
have a major impact on how much the visitor will forgive you. Twitter's Fail
Whale is the perfect example :)

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potatolicious
_Anything_ is better than Borders' page (except possibly a blank one)... even
a rather cold, drab, boring error page that at least describes the error (we
are over capacity, sod off) would serve better. I don't think we really need
to do any extensive focus group testing to agree on this much...

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lsb
Amazon has repeatedly said that page load times matter. They decreased them
once by 0.1s, and revenue dropped 1%. Google is also fanatical about speed
(ever noticed how much GMail caches things?). Linus Torvalds said that because
Git is so fast at what it does, it changes the way you use SCM.

Interaction times are CRUCIAL.

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csytan
This is a great idea for marketing:

Provide a walk-through of your product on an example client showing how it can
be useful.

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lallysingh
A classic good error page (a 404)

<http://homestarrunner.com/foobar>

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papaf
I just get the message that I haven't install a flash plugin....

