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What data does a 404 error page provide?

A lot of people seem to think that a 404 page is a dead end street. It's not, there's a whole lot of data that can help you find the content your visitor was looking for. Let's start with the URL: it contains something very useful. All the text that's there after the slash of your domain should be pointing you to what it is the person was looking for.

Great and detailed tutorial on how-to create better 404 pages for wordpress

If you have a broken link on your site or the pages, which don’t exist any longer, have moved to a new server or have never existed at all, visitors will get an internal error message from the server. However, by default these messages aren’t that helpful

Whilst a well designed page can provide a means to find what they are looking for, wouldn’t it be great to display related information visitor might be interested or even redirecting them back to main page in a custom 404 page, here we have collected some 50 cool custom 404 pages just to inspire you, well not all are very informative some are simply an image or just with funny message but still it goes with the site itself..

1.) Carsonified

2.) Youcastr

3.) Unitinteractive

4.) Agens

5.) Beta.mnet

6.) Us.blizzard

7.) Huwshimi

8.) Springload

9.) Redtag

10.) Nclud

11.) Wufoo

12.) Expansion broadcast

13.) Vimeo

14.) Surfingonstatic

15.) Cssremix

16.) Mailchimp

17.) Robo

18.) Bol

19.) 24-7media

20.) Leapanywhere

21.) Dundeeliving

22.) Twurn

23.) D20srd

24.) Gadies

25.) Acromediainc

26.) Chrisjennings

27.) Astuteo

28.) Studio7designs

29.) Yourwebjob

30.) Odopod

31.) Trubru

32.) Lookitsme

33.) Zanami

34.) Gog

35.) Spongebob

36.) Digiguru

37.) Twitter

38.) Gdzl

39.) Itchyrobot

40.) Deviantart

41.) Digitalmash

42.) Shelfworthy

43.) Istockphoto

44.) Gregone

45.) Spreadshirt

46.) Anidea

47.) Fubiz

48.) Ferdaze

49.) Cssscoop

50.) Creationthing

51.) Patterntap

52.) Twingly

53.) Southcreative

54.) Newspond

Featuring deep-linking, url error management, playlist maker and integrated twitter reader. Designed with a musician in mind but equally suitable for any artist.

Many times in your life you have probably seen these petrifying 404 error pages which meant nothing but that you’ve lost your way surfing the web in your pursuance of certain objectives. The 404 error declares that the user’s request was able to communicate with the server, but the server couldn’t find what was requested. And that is probably the only useful information you would find reaching the “zero between fours” dead-end default pages.

Serving the right 404 error page is essential for a successful website.
In my opinion these points are important as well:

1. send the right headers (don't send a 404 state if you moved the page)
2. offer a site search on your 404 error (google offers a nice snippet)
3. Tell the user that something is wrong

Love it!

Quoted from: Pattern Tap : Main Tap : Maxvoltar 404 page design
http://patterntap.com/tap/pattern/176537006849836bbdaa450