The Lucid CMS has been designed from the ground up to provide robust error handling. Errors come in a variety of flavours, so the CMS responds in a number of different ways.
Error Correction - Malformed URL
The standard system can correct slightly misspelt top level URLs. For example if you click on the following deliberately misspelt URL (note the missing o at the end of develop) http://dthree.co.uk/develp/and watch your browser's address bar, you'll see the malformed link re-written to the correct URL which is then displayed.
Your browser is first sent a 301 message (301 is the HTTP Status code that means The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource should use the returned URI) and then redirected to the correct address.
Error Correction - Missing part of the URL
Under some circumstances, the system can serve the content that is expected, even though the URL is missing a major chunk. Some of our dynamic modules append their URLs with SEO orientated content, and the server can get the content from just the ID .
http://royalcorinthian.co.uk/newsstory/2000328/rcyc-last-part-wrong
Correcting these errors is actually more important for SEO reasons. As the site can get the news story from just the reference number in the URL, the priority here is to ensure that this page doesn't get indexed as existing under multiple URLs.
It's also important for those circumstances where a very long URL has been truncated: the most likely reason for this being that the address has wrapped in an email.
When all else fails
There's only so much error-correcting help that remedial services can provide and ultimately there are going to be occasions when you need to serve up an error page. This form of error handling, sometimes called a "404 Engine", intercepts incorrectly addressed pages and gracefully informs the user of the error.
To see the error-handling in action on this site, follow this link to a missing page.
When would this be needed?
Although the internal site navigation will always point to an active page, there are circumstances when external inbound links to your site will encounter errors.
- Links that point to pages you've deleted
- External links that are incorrectly formed or outdated
- Web addresses you've manually created on your site that have typos
From Google's Search Engine Optimization Guide
“Have a useful 404 page - Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. ”