Improving Customer Experience on Your Site – Part 1 – 404’s

We’ve all seen it many, many times. You click a link or type a URL and you are confronted abruptly with a cryptic and unhelpful 404 Error Message like this :

Unhelpful 404

Don’t bludgeon your poor visitors with error pages like this. Remember, your competition is only a click away. It doesn’t take much to irritate your users enough to get them to say, “Enough,” and off they go.

A professional handles such errors with aplomb. Some suggestions:

Beyond Arial and Helvetica

Way way back “in the day” I did tech support for Word. I worked for a company here in Massachusetts; we had to pretend we worked for Microsoft. One of the questions we would often get was how to save a document so that when it was emailed to someone, the font information was preserved, even if they didn’t have the font installed. Mind you, TrueType itself was only a few years old at the time. Microsoft and Apple were developing the standard together, believe it or not.

Stay with me; this is going somewhere.

Free tethered mode shooting

ECP_00087 My children — aged 4 and 2 — love using the Playstation Eye camera and EyeCreate software on our PS3. The shots they take, though grainy and small, are spontaneous and full of joy because they can see the picture right away; there is immediate feedback on what they shoot. They have a blast and it shows. However, point a “real camera” at them and they become awkward and stiff. What to do?