Does my web developer make any sense?

@JhaceunFeb 01.2008

I need a second opinion on this exchange I’ve had with our web developer.

We’ve just gone through a re-design, and I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the number of /404 hits. I’ll just paste in the email’s so you guys can give me your opinion on his assessment. It makes no sense to me, but I’m a web novice…

——————–My email——————-

All,

Attached is January’s web site report. The first full month with the new website.

Good news is that unique visitors is up from an average of 650/month last year to 868 for last month.

I did notice that the second most viewed page on the website is /404! That’s the page you get when there is a bad link somewhere (inside or outside the website) That’s not good. People tend to go away after getting that page… It was “viewed” 901 times last month.

Frank H, has anyone run a link checking program on the new website to be sure that all links are good? Could you run one now? Also, is there code in place to re-direct people getting /404 to our homepage?

——————–His Response——————-

The 404 page was customized with all site navigation from the beginning for this issue. Have you actually seen the 404 page?

~~[url]~~http://www.polymagtek.com/404.htm[/url]

This issue is also completely commonplace after a site redesign. I believe is was at your request to not have a separate page for narrow and wide web cleaners.

So of course there were a couple of pages removed – again, common for redesign but planned for from the beginning. That’s what happens If Google is still indexing those pages.

——————–My Response——————-

I had not actually seen the /404 page. It looks good.

It appears that there are only a couple bad links on the site. We would like those fixed, but I don’t see how that could account for so many /404 hits. Out of 901, the stats indicate that 229 are entry, which implies the rest are internal links, though I’m not sure I always trust awstats.

The point is we need to know how people are ending up on that page. It is almost as popular a page as our home page!

I’m not sure how I should expect a lot of /404 hits because we request layout changes. If there are pages from the old site that arn’t on the new site, then those pages should be re-directed to the most closely relavent page of the new site, not the /404 page. This would eliminate any problems with google indexing or folks’ internet favorites. Has this been done?

Can we log the referring page for all /404 hits? This would help us to find out if there really is a problem, or if there is something confusing going on with the stats.

I would much rather be proactive in this than follow a do nothing – this is normal approach.

——————–His Last Response——————-

We have located the source of the 404 – it’s referencing a transparent gif which is part of the header on each page. Because using includes the path may contain an extra “../” because the header is located in the includes folder. Although it references a view it is not necessarily a human view.

This is a server response that AW Stats is logging over a transparent image. At this time I will consider this non issue as far as visitor usability. We will look into excluding that image URL from the stats.

No need to worry over this – what does remain is the greater visitor traffic. Pay more attention to the index page view. This is a better indicator of site abandonment and from what I see is quite low.

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4 Comments(s) _↴

@ryanbutlerFeb 01.2008 — #If in fact the 404 is being caused by an incorrect image path, than as far as visitor issues, your developer is correct. However, 404 errors mean a page cannot be found, so I have difficulty in believing that a incorrect image path is the cause of this statistic.

You probably need to set up Google Analytics for your site so that you can trace more detailed statistics for your site, or purchase their commercial equivalent, which is Urchin and I would recommend doing a little more research before calling this a done deal.

@yamaharussFeb 02.2008 — #This is actually pretty common and the very thing has happened to me with transparent.gif. It's an easy thing to overlook especially with something that's usually given a 1x1 or similar pixel attribute.

Time to clean up your code. Any decent analyzer would have given you the exact error location.

@JhaceunauthorFeb 02.2008 — #Thanks folks. I am seeing that it is a case of sloppy coding. We'll see if he can fix this up so that it won't add hits to the /404 page.

We have bigger problems now anyway, turns out IE6 isn't displaying properly and half of our visitors viewed a basically unusable website for a month. nice.

@Jeff_MottFeb 02.2008 — #However, 404 errors mean a page cannot be found, so I have difficulty in believing that a incorrect image path is the cause of this statistic.[/quote]ryanbutler, 404 means a [i]request[/i], whatever that request may be for, couldn't be found. An image constitutes a request, so a missing image could easily account for the statistics.

Jhaceun, server logs typically list what the request was for in addition to the response code. For example,127.0.0.1 - - [21/Dec/2007:02:56:58 -0500] "GET [color=blue]/favicon.ico[/color] HTTP/1.1" [color=red]404[/color] 209What you, or someone tech savy, can do is filter out the entries for the missing image and see how many other 404 response entries there are.

We have bigger problems now anyway, turns out IE6 isn't displaying properly and half of our visitors viewed a basically unusable website for a month. nice.[/quote]That's very sloppy indeed. IE6 users still outnumber even IE7 users, so developers should [i]always[/i] be checking their work in IE6.