No matter how well you set up your website, you'll always have to deal with error messages. What is the best way to deal with error messages? Our starting point is that you should always think from the perspective of your visitor. A good designer not only thinks about the shape, but also about the ease of use. This is an important part of the design discipline UX design, User Experience Design.
Error message
You often see an error message on a software tool or on a website that you don't understand at all. The only thing you understand is that something is not going well. In the event of an error, such as a form where a visitor forgets to fill in a field, it is important that you help the user. And not by telling them that they are doing something wrong, but by telling them what to do.
For example, with the error message below, it's better to say: Sorry, you entered the wrong name when opening the library. Then the user knows what they did wrong.
For example, if you use a field in a form where the user can enter a maximum of 100 characters, it's not helpful to just say it's wrong. Instead, you show a notification on the screen, Sorry, try to formulate a response of up to 100 characters.
Speaking of forms. You know them, forms that take you half an hour because you forget to fill in certain mandatory fields. If a form is very long and you don't immediately see which field you've forgotten, it's extremely annoying. What you do as a designer is turn the fields red if someone forgets them, tell them which fields they still need to fill in, or jump directly to the field and show a text: fill it in again. Help your visitor! That's customer service.
404 message
A 404 message is a technical term that notifies a web server when a page does not exist. The user may have entered the wrong address or a page has been deleted or renamed, and as a web administrator, you forgot to change it on a page where you are pointing to this page. Can happen, no problem. What is a problem, however, is that most visitors have no idea what a 404 message is and that many websites show this message to the visitor without further information. That is a missed opportunity. The visitor can drop out. What you can do is tell the visitor that the page doesn't exist and offer them a few suggestions. Place a few links to your most important pages on your 404 page to help your visitor and not lose your visitor. In addition, you also help Google indexing with this. This is because the robot can index directly from a 404 to other pages.
