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Helping navigation with user friendly confirmation pages

Confirmation pages are generally needed after a user submits an online form or completes a purchase. For those cases, you must design good confirmation pages. Unless you design a good, custom confirmation page, your visitors will be thrown into the generic confirmation page provided by your web host which will most likely confuse your users and make them think that they have left your site.
The confirmation page has several objectives:

1. It must clearly tell your users that their form was completed and sent successfully. For example, if the form is a subscription box for your newsletter or ezine, your confirmation page must say something like this: "Congratulations! You are now subscribed to our newsletter."
2. It must give clear instructions of what your visitor has to do next. To use the same subscription box example, your confirmation page will also say something like this: "You will soon receive an email message asking you to follow a link to activate your subscription. Follow that link to start receiving your ezine immediately".
3. It must provide your visitor with two or three navigation options so that he can continue browsing your site (don�t just let them go.). Two popular options are: "Return to our main page" and "Browse our archives".

One important consideration is that your confirmation page must have the same look and feel as the rest of your pages, so that your visitors knows that they are still in your site.

If you're using forms, you must insert the necessary instructions to your form script, so that the browser will automatically display your confirmation page once the form has been successfully submitted. You usually do this by adding the following code after the <'form'> tag at the beginning our your form script:

Note: some cgi programs (form handling programs) use the word "redirect" instead of "success" in their programs. Check with your web host to see which one do they use. To see an example of a confirmation page, you can go to: http://www.theinternetdigest.net/thankyousubcribe.html

This is the confirmation page I use after a visitor has successfully submitted my newsletter's subscription form.

For more on how to design confirmation pages and 404 Error pages I recommend Defensive Design for the Web: How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points by world class redesign firm 37signals; following the tips in this book can make the difference between having one-time visitors and repeat customers.