60 Really Cool and Creative Error 404 Pages

I don't know if cool and creative is necessarily what I'd aim for.

Tell them what went wrong, tell them why it went wrong, tell them what they can do about it. Then, maybe, make a joke.

Here's mine. Nothing to write home about, but it describes the problem in terms my customers can understand, and gives them options which work for the majority of people.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/doesnt/exist

I'd add a search box but it has never been a pressing priority since I can correct borked links on the backend, which means "blogger typoed a URL" only 404s until I get to my admin interface.

Always put the site map on the 404 page, but you should be looking at the 404's and fixing them too.

If someone is sending 10 people a day your way with a mistyped url you should catch it and redirect it.

So if marshallk profiles your hot startup and sends everyone to http://yoursi.te/bunnys.html when they should have been going to http://yoursi.te/bunnies.html catching it and fixing it on your end should be part of the 404 view.

They are cute but they aren't solving the problem and helping the user recover.

A better example is Motley Fool. It has a cute little haiku which defuses the situation but then they give a lot of recovery advice.

http://www.fool.com/foobarbazqux

I've never put this much effort into my 404 pages. Usually it's just a "The page you typed in cannot be found. Please check the spelling or use the search box below if you need help finding it." Or something like that at least.

None of these 404's are very helpful to the site user or administrator, just funny.