As you all know one of the great LinkAider’ features is broken link check. Since the early release we’ve seen many 404 pages while working on this great tool. Some are plain old Apache or IIS (Tomcat sometimes) error pages, some are custom crafted pages that tend to help users. But some of them fail to fulfill this mission.
Common and very annoying errors are:
- Huge 404 pages
A user is supposed to wait while 50kb or larger hmtl stuffed with irrelevant pictures loads just to see a message that there is no page he was looking for. - Missing scripts and/or images
Some developers just clone their 404 pages from their sites’ codes forgetting to fix file paths. Result: ugly and broken error pages. - Misleading error messages
These sound like: “This item is no longer available for sale. Search for this item in the search box.” (If this item is no longer available what should I search for? And was your faq.php for sale?), “There are no tickets to this event” and similar. - Full-page ads
Well, these are no errors actually, but it is not too polite to show a full page ad for 5 to 20 seconds and then redirect a user to a non existing page. - Automatic redirects
Some websites show their error pages for 3 – 5 seconds telling that the user will be redirected to the main page. Where the error page is stuffed with other content and error message is a thin line hidden somewhere between banners and 100+ line long sitemap. If you are showing error message – get user some time to read it, because sometimes it’s hard to understand why you are redirected out of the sudden. - Showing completely different content instead of the old one (while website headers return 404)
This technique is very extensively used among news sites. And sometimes it’s hard to get why I see an article about shoes when I clicked the link to hat fashion article.
But we’ve also found many nice 404 page designs that really help users who are lost on the internet highway. And here we’ll show you some of our findings:
5ives.com
A Buddhistic message to the visitor
campaignmonitor.com
Clean design and helpful suggestions on what a visitor should do next
dainese.com
Would you be scared ?
addons.mozilla.org
Clean, helpful and beautiful
0at.org
Were you looking for a bat holding a balloon?
fi.bemmu.com
Cute anime girl pointing to you that there is nothing you were looking for
newyorker.com
Old-school highway drawing. The road to nowhere
getmefast.com
Just a nice design
action-electronics.com
Warning: they have a webmaster who may be coding their site while drunk
ibiblio.org
A very neat description in all the possible languages
meish.org
Kitty stole your web page…
thedisneyblog.com
Danger, Donald Duck!
current.com
No happy ending on the internet highway. Maybe you didn’t click hard enough?
vimeo.com
No more information available
cityofheroes.com
A very videogame-like design of 404
observer.com
Another black and white old-school drawing
laughingsquid.com
Tentacles “locating a page” in the pool
marksandspencer.com
Suggesting for what you may be looking for
palmbeachpost.com
You got bounced over to this beach
productplanner.com
A green school board, white chalk, 404
psphacks.net
ASCII art
reddit.com
A broke reddit character
scrapblog.com
Pink, beach, girly. Have you lost your way?
crowdspring.com
The site owners feel embarrassed about their errors
vanityfair.com
Diplomacy on the shoestring: blame the third party!
versionsapp.com
Plain and simple
secure.wufoo.com
Dinosaur shouting out “404!”
Yahoo! News
Extremely helpful: if they can’t find what you’re looking for, they redirect you to Yahoo!’s search page

Tags: 404 errors, design
Thank you so much for the inclusion in this illustrious (not a sic) list. :)
Hi! Kickback klooper in spite of my english jer, buti danged precarious re application .