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What's Good for KR Isn't Good for Web Users

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weak
2/13/2002 3:32:45 PM
Posted By: Robert Boucher

There's absolutely no excuse for not allowing your users to keep their bookmarks. In three years at a recent company, we had 3 different infrastructures; *all* of the bookmarks from the prior generations worked in the future generations. That functionality was part of the redesign effort and was, frankly, pretty easy.

Of course, we're talking about a company whose job page says, "The vendor that hosted Knight Ridder's Job Openings page is no longer supporting that service. Development of a replacement is under way. Job seekers may wish to consult job listings at individual Knight Ridder companies through the company's Real Cities sites."

So it seems that they don't just have problems with internal projects.




Demystification
2/13/2002 11:37:50 AM
Posted By: Robert Spears

Granted broken links and "file not found" errors are bad for one's brand. However this situation is 100% correctable provided all of the stories have been imported to the new system. (If the original stories were not imported, this is another more serious blunder, altogether). A redirect table should be used so that when an old page address is requested the user is redirected to the new location. When launching a new system and site, it is unrealistic to expect to have 100% of a large archive immediately accessible. Trade-offs have to be made while following up quickly after the launch to correct problems of this nature. As the previous poster mentioned more informative and friendly 404 page messages would help in the interim.

At a minimum they could have had a message explaining how to find an article using their search engine or archives. I tried this and was quite dissapointed. First, they do not have a standard search engine box on the home page. (I find this to be shocking in this day and age - in their case, I would integrate search and archives. Second, I could not find the article in their archives. (And even if I had, it would likely have been in plain text (e.g. no hyper-links or html formatting)).



Handling 404 errors gracefully
2/13/2002 3:47:40 AM
Posted By: Madhu Menon

Since you're obviously upset about the linkrot from the redesign of KnightRidder sites, you might be interested in this article I wrote a long while back. It's on creating useful "404 - page not found" error pages.

You can read it at: http://www.evolt.org/article/mmds/4090/4299/index.html


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