Otherwise how does a user know that the URL they went to is unknown or expired? I agree 404 etc pages /should/ be better designed to inform the user then give

Otherwise how does a user know that the URL they went to is unknown or expired? I agree 404 etc pages /should/ be better designed to inform the user then give them links/options to carry on their journey. Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/404.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/404.shtml - we tried to explain a little about the problem, to a young audience and then offer them two ways of continuing their journey - go to homepage or use search. We also made other URLs fail gracefully. If a user was at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo/by/type/printgames http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo/by/type/printgames and then 'hacked' the URL to get http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo/by/type http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo/by/type - we still offered them a page that correctly renders and has the information they were looking for - though we'd never link to this page ourselves (the correct root here would be http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/thingstodo )