Let’s acknowledge the obvious right away: nobody should ever see a 404 Not Found error message on your Website. It means that something is broken!

With that said, accidents happen. Sometimes content gets moved around, a software update or Web host migration changes links, or someone just goofs up when typing a link’s URL. When one of these mistakes occur, it’s good to have a customized 404 error message for two reasons:

1. The default is not very helpful. Somebody is actively looking for information on your site, which is a Good Thing. Help them find it with navigation links and/or a search field.
2. This is a branding opportunity. How do you want your company to be perceived? The default option is cold and unhelpful. It’s a small thing, but small moments at the margins are what truly define our brand in the long run.

Smashing Magazine has a great list of companies that have effectively capitalized on this branding opportunity with something interesting, beautiful, or clever. Some of my favorites include:

• The Frye/Wiles Creative Agency demonstrates whimsy and creativity
• InspirationBit lists popular and recommended articles
• Gog.com has a 404 that’s clever and fun

For some reason, fat Homer in the mumu seems to be popular too:

• Henrik Hedegaard (fat Homer #1)
• ARTTHUG Studios (fat Homer #2)

Customizing a 404 page is done by updating one of the files on your Web server, which your hosting provider can help you with if you’re not sure how to do it yourself. A very basic 404 error customization can take less than 10 minutes, which I know because I made one of my own right before publishing this article.¹

For more guidance on custom 404s, see MakeUseOf.com on how to build a great 404 page. And then, once you’ve built yours, you can hope that nobody ever sees it!

1. Yes, I am hilariously inept with Photoshop. [↩]

Would you like to impress a geek this week? This Friday, you can build some quick techie cred by wishing an IT worker a happy Unix Timestamp 1234567890 Day!

I know: “What?!”  

The Unix time stamp calculates the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970. Using this simple string helps programmers easily perform date and time computations in their code. This Friday the 13th (spooky!) will see a very special moment in arbitrary number history: about halfway through the minute at 3:31pm PST (6:31pm EST), exactly 1,234,567,890 seconds will have passed since the beginning of UTC. It’s a totally pointless but fun little reason to celebrate, like the calendar Year 2000 but on a much smaller scale.

It’s worth noting that a new sort of Year 2000 Problem will occur on January 19, 2038, when Unix time reaches 9999999999 and runs out of digits—also known as the Year 2038 Problem. As UnixTimeStamp.com explains (with an irresistible pun):

Before this moment millions of applications will need to either adopt a new convention for time stamps or be migrated to 64-bit systems which will buy the time stamp a “bit” more time. 

As with the Y2K problem, my guess is that we’ll all be fine… but things could also go horribly wrong.

Effective Marketing is an occasional series about uniquely clever, remarkable, or, just plain effective marketing campaigns.

Industry analyst and techno-journalist John Battelle recently presented to McDonald’s on the power of social networking, during which he demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing by asking his Twitter followers to give their feedback on the McDonald’s brand.

My own response was in appreciation of a recent McDonald’s ad campaign—specifically, 140 billboards in Western Washington that poked fun at Starbucks:

Clever advertising during a recession

Perhaps noting that discretion is the better part of valor, Starbucks has chosen not to respond in kind.