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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

The Zerply 404 page is a wonderful example of why details matter.

http://www.zerply.com/foobar

Poor spelling shouts "limited resources and lack of professionalism" loud and clear. If you're asking people to trust you with their data and put time into profiles, you need to show that you're big and serious.

I don't use LinkedIn because it's the coolest kid on the block, I use it because I need to find people to hire, network with, and in the past I've needed it to find gigs and jobs.

I'm going to go where the most people are, and where I feel most confident that my data will be managed professionally.

I'm not going to jump ship for a startup just because LinkedIn is requiring me to opt out if I don't want my picture to appear near an ad. That's not Armageddon, it's just a minor, and ultimately inconsequential, annoyance.

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So a multi-billion dollar behemoth that uses your image without your permission in an advertisement for a product that you don't support is a "minor, and ultimately inconsequential, annoyance", but a tiny little startup has a typo on an ERROR page and that's a deal breaker?

Wow. High fives to you for supporting the little guy.

If you're referring to "Oh noes!", that's more of a meme than poor spelling.

Personally, I think there aren't enough sites with a personality and sense of humor. I get the point that the very serious career types will not appreciate this, but they might not be Zerply's target audience. I'll also point out that the home page looks fine, nothing silly there. It seems they are just trying to diffuse tension on an error page with humor.

I'm not referring to "oh noes," I know the difference between intentional colloquialisms and misspellings.

I'm referring to the repeated use of "your" instead of the correct word, "you're."

Which appears to have already been fixed. I wonder if LinkedIn would fix that in < 45 minutes if you found a typo and posted about it here on HN.

I agree that having ads use some of your information to target an ad isn't the end of the world. But I definitely disagree with your statement about Zerply's 404 page. Yes, they made one grammatical mistake (if you're willing to accept the "oh noes" slang), but they're programmers and designers, not english students. While that might suggest that they could have taken more time to review the details of their site, that doesn't mean they don't have an awesome and trustworthy service. I think you're comparing apples and oranges there.

I suspect it's more the "Looks like we can't find what your looking for" than the "oh noes".

Good spot! We are planning to do a full site audit of that stuff, just been too busy with start-up life. We have 6 full time staff and not over a thousand like others.

All good. Best of luck with it. :-)

I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what the fuss was about before I realized they fixed it! Woops. However, a question remains: will they eventually sell out and do similar privacy-controversial decisions as LinkedIn? Will everyone have to move again? I'm sure 3 years ago LinkedIn would deny that they would do anything like their recent move, but here we are. People keep moving from a service to another, hoping that it will be better, but what's to stop the new service from doing the same tricks once it gets big enough?

Comma before "but" too, please.

You could also tone down the deliberate cuteness. "Hmm what? Oh noes, looks like..." six nothing words before getting to the point: 404. It's wasted space, tediously hip and cloying. I hazard to say most of us older than 12 aren't amused.

I actually find that when a website takes the time to create a personal and interesting 404 page, it signals the fact that they really care about user experiencer. 404 pages can be some of the most jarring things for a user and the fact that they shared some personality and helped the user get back on track says to me that the team is focused on the right things.

It's not really about the spelling error itself. It's about the fact that you don't have the time to look for things like that, because of start-up life.

My point is that if that detail is missed, I begin to worry about other, more important details - such as security and the safety of my data.

Think of it as the "brown M&M test."

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