Exceptional 404 pages you should see

04.04.2018

Today is April 4, with which we congratulate you! That is why we have prepared a special, festive article.

We've been in the web development and digital marketing market for over 9 years and have seen impressive homepage layouts, cool and inspiring portfolio pages, even great About Us and Contact Us pages.

However, we rarely see 404 pages that help customers find the right goal.

Many global brands and companies ignore the importance of 404 error pages and this is a huge mistake.

A 404 error is a standard response indicating:

  • the site is offline;
  • the required content could not be found (due to the deletion of a file or page);
  • the requested address does not exist;
  • The URL has been changed and the redirect has not been configured.

The 404 page is your tool for communicating with customers who have requested inaccessible content. A visually appealing, user-friendly 404 page shows customers that you care about them and you're interested in keeping them on your site.

We visited hundreds of sites to find the best examples of 404 pages. These great examples show how a web designer's creativity can turn mistakes into conversions.

What should be the 404 page

Pixar

The world-famous Pixar presents the hero Sadness from the beloved cartoon. Pixar feels all the pain and sadness of the user when he gets to the 404 page! They included a cute text snippet playing around the plot of their popular cartoon. (Worth a look if you haven't already!)

20th Century Fox

Absolutely loving implementation of Foxmovies 404 page. The captivating cutscenes evoke both humor and sympathy (we saw Edward Scissorhands on our first visit). Not only does it evoke great memories of Fox films, but it also contains a link to a large gallery of video clips, with relevant text at the top of each film, which is different every time. You can look at this 404 for a long time by refreshing the page!

dog studio

Design company Dogstudio shares dog themed GIFs with us on its 404 pages. Funny, short and cute - the way we love them!

Their home page and contact page also look impressive and worth a look.

Marvel

If on your first visit you get a magnifying glass and a ant-man, don't worry! Marvel has everything it takes to surprise you. Just refresh the page! Wonderful superheroes are presented in themed designs to suit any fanfiction from Marvel comics.

9gag

9gag's approach to 404 page design fully reflects their overall mood and content.

John Travolta is never boring and he never goes out of style! It's great that this page also has an application to download! A very smart decision is to leave a link to the 9gag app. Double win!

What should not be 404

In addition to excellent 404 pages, there are a huge number of uninformative, useless and repulsive examples. Unfortunately, poor quality error pages are overwhelming.

Duty page 404. There is no intelligible information on it, and what the user should do next is also not clear.

Uninformative pages. Such pages strongly repel users, it is difficult to lure the user with an ordinary piece of text that he already knows.

Empty 404 pages. In this case, everything is very clear for the user.

Conclusion

We had a great time writing this article for you. I wish you knew how many 404 pages didn't live up to our expectations. With all the work some companies dedicate to their brand, they would do well to put more focus on their 404 pages, as the companies above did.

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Internet Marketing
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