Havoc Inspired

Plenty of people have custom “404 Page Not Found” pages. A quick search on google reveals plenty of galleries of such examples and Barry Wardrop appears to have been the first to spot mine.

Very nice site Ryan, glad to see it now with the kerning is sorted, absolutely love your 404 page error!! I nearly pooped myself thinking oooh what have i done!

that was great ;)

Have a look for yourself here: 404 link

So what are the benefits of having a custom 404 page:

• Your site doesn’t feel broken when a visitor hits your 404
• Server generated 404 pages tell visitors nothing, which means they are more likely to give up and move on
• You have control of your own 404 page, which means you can encourage visitors to keep looking for what they are after, for example by providing them with search facilities
• You have the opportunity to make light of what is basically a failure to provide
• It shows your visitors that you care about the details

It’s so easy to add your own 404 page to your site. If you’re using Apache web server and .htaccess files are supported you can simply add:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

And style notfound.html to your liking.

If you’re using a CMS/Publishing Platform such as Wordpress (which is the case for this site) you can add a 404.php file in your theme folder.

So there’s no excuse not to really.

What great 404 pages have you come across?