404.. error!

November 30th, 2009 · 4:02 pm @ simplycolette - No Comments

404SimplyC

Last week at my internship, I worked on a 404 error page for one of our clients. I had loads of fun designing it. How many people can say they designed an error today? (OK, outside of an hacker… but they don’t “design” errors… whatever.)

For those of you that don’t know, a 404 error page “is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but the server could not find what was requested.”¹ In other words, it is the page that you get when you put URL that doesn’t exist at that domain. Why is it called a 404 error? Well, I thought you’d never ask. It is called a 404 error because,”404 is one of the standard response codes of the {telnet} {protocol} on which the web’s {HTTP} is based. The first 4 indicates a client error such as a mistyped URL. The middle 0 refers to a general syntax error. The last 4 just indicates the specific error in the group of 40x, which also includes 400: Bad Request, 401: Unauthorized, etc.”²

I had never really thought about designing an error page. But why not? So, for today’s post I thought that I would share 404 error pages that fall under three categories: Error pages of popular sites, cool error pages, and cute error pages.