404

I’ve been a little behind on my rss reading so I’ve been trying to catch up this week. This morning I read this one at Simplebits on unique or outstanding 404 pages. It was fun looking at all the creative/useful ways people found to customize their 404 pages, but it was about when I got to this one that I thought, why make 404 pages with lots of helpful search info? I mean, most sites do nothing but show 404′s when the URL doesn’t resolve. So that means most users are pretty used to seeing them. At least for me, when I see a custom 404 page with “helpful” info it takes me a few seconds to realize that this isn’t a content page that I searched for. If it looked at least something like a typical un-custom 404 page then I know exactly what to do. But that one or two seconds of “wait just a minute, this is a 404 page!” is far too costly for my liking. So as for me and my site, all you get is this, or if you’re really lucky, this.