Campaigns & Elections' Politics - February 2008 - (Page 57) Your 911 for Error 404 C ampaigns can turn online dead ends into valuable real estate. The dead ends are the so-called “Error 404” pages that pop up when you stumble onto a missing or broken link or when you look for a web page that has moved or been taken down. For most sites, the error page is plain vanilla and offers little help in guiding people where they really want to go. But it’s possible—and worthwhile—to do more. “Having dead links on your page is not a benefit to you,” says Scott Detweiler, chief executive officer of Idealcampaign.com, a Milwaukee-based company that creates web sites for political campaigns. For one thing, sites with dead links—Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign site is one prominent example—don’t fare as well on search engines, he says. Some campaigns still don’t appreciate that a dead end online is like telling a potential voter to get lost. To do better, campaigns can install links on their dead pages directing people someplace more lively—say to a video of an espelively—say, espe cially powerful speech or to pages that stress the latest crucial talking points. Presidential candidate John Edwards, for example, plants conspicuous links to his home page right after telling visitors a page doesn’t exist. (Chris Dodd did the same thing until he left the race.) Some candidates, like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, deliver the message on a page containing general tabs for navigating their sites, allowing an errant visitor to find a live link. Still, some campaigns have yet to appreciate that a dead end online is like telling a potential voter to get lost. Not smart. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES February 2008 Politics 57 http://www.opinionfactor.com http://www.opinionfactor.com
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