10 - Artistic, bright, interesting and entertaining 404 and error pages

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011 

So over the last year there has been an explosion of people taking 404 and error pages and turning them into what can be more often than not, more entertaining than the website itself. It also can put a different spin on your organisation, portraying a fun and entertaining side.  Google and other search engines highly recommend the use of 404 pages, and rightfully so. If your using a server generated one, well its just plain ugly and the user has to click back on the browser, and it the user is still left thinking where too now? By creating a 404 page, we can offer a range of pages and funnel them to drive our core business products or services.

Lets have a look at some custom 404 pages

We have our own, but hopefully its not as interesting as our content as I mentioned above, we are adding links to our products and services we try to promote, furthermore we are trying to portray our creative fun side.
http://www.gentex.com.au

These guys are a web developer and cartoonist, this is again just a nice play on what they do.

http://www.jeandelbrel.com/404notfound

This is just brand awareness, carrying out their look throughout the site.

http://www.cascadebreweryco.com.au/404notfound

This is just a really creative looking 404 page, it has working links to each of the menu items also.

http://us.blizzard.com/404 

This is one of my personal favourites, the have tied in relevant words with the sites theme and service offering… Very smart!

http://www.teetimes.co.uk/404.php

This shows the developers personality, its rather quirky, we like this one!

http://www.jhuskisson.com/404

While this is a smart looking page, they also have provided links to their core links… nice.

http://www.gog.com/en/error/404

This one is missing text, and some links, but the idea of this one is simply sensational!

http://css-tricks.com/thispagedoesntexist

This one is has a rather humorous side to it

http://www.fryewiles.com/templates/errors/404.html

Big company, great to see they have some humour, but aside from that, its still promoting their products.

http://www.heinz.com/404

So there is 10 great looking 404 error pages, so what is a 404 page?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) states that 404 Not Found should be used in cases where the server fails to find the requested location and is unsure of its status. Whenever a page has been permanently removed, the status code used must be 410. But hardly have we seen a 410 page. Instead, 404 Not Found page has become popular and the most commonly used error page.

KEEP in mind…

Now if you create a great looking 404, you should see the considerations that Google suggest like ensuring you exclude it from search engines, you don't want them to add a Google link to your 404 do you? have a look here for more information on googles suggestions

We want to see em’

If this blog has somehow inspired you to create a cool looking error page, show us we want to see it!

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Tags: Web Design , Skinning , SEO

Categories: Web Design, SEO

Location: BlogsGentex's Web Blog

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