Another option is to make use of a service called 404 toons which is basically a custom 404 error page that is displaying an animation that is talking to the lost user and provides a link back to the homepage of the website. It is probably a good idea to display some of the characters that can be displayed to the visitors.

A selection of characters are available ranging from a Mafia dude, policeman to a secret agent and an alien. Some characters offer multiple animations. It might be a good idea to check out the page listing all available characters on the 404 Toons website. All characters can be downloaded in one package from the website.

The developers are also offering custom characters and a professional voice recording service on their website. This is not only available for 404 error pages but also other purposes like instructions on a website.

You might also be interested in our best of 404 error pages which contains screenshots of some great 404 error pages.

Update: The 404 Toons website is no longer available, the developers seem to have abandoned it and the project.

Website owners can leave it at that or create their own custom 404 error page to provide the user with solutions or to further humiliate him. Really depends on the type of site that you are visiting. Long time reader Daniel collected four interesting best of 404 error lists on the Internet on his (Swedish) Bloggliv blog. He is also giving away three Hypersnap 6 licenses if you are keen to win that software.

The four best of lists that he links to contain a total of 245 404 error pages. Many pretty funny, some stylish and more than a few plain evil. Want some examples? Here we go:

To view them all follow this, this, that or this link.

That reminds me that I have to create a custom 404 error page for Ghacks..

The extension is called Errorzilla, and it replaces your standard error screen with a much more useful one. After getting a 404 for example, you now have 7 options. The first option is the old refresh one, it’s called “Retry this, which reloads the page to see if it suddenly appeared.

Then there are 3 option to view the webpage on other sites, there is “Google Cache which try’s Google’s cache if there is a cached version of the site there. Then you have “Coralize, they have a nice explanation what it exactly is on their website.
And last we have “Wayback, which has a list of saved version of the website, normally you use it to view how webpages were “in the old days” (their oldest copy of ghacks comes from Oct 27, 2005) but it’s also very useful for this purpose.

And then there are the last 3 options, “Ping” which “pings” the site, “Trace” which traces the way from your pc to the website and “Whois” which lists information on the owner of the domain, and these 3 options are done through dnsstuff.com and whois.net
I hope this extension has made your (computer) life a bit easier, or showed you some interesting sites (like Wayback) and you can always leave comments if you have something on your mind.

Update: Please note that the extension has been uploaded to the Mozilla add-on repository in the meantime. Please check out Error Zilla Firefox Extension for a review and link.