.eduGuru had a good piece on creating a custom 404 page. IC has a custom 404 page. Check. Mission accomplished. Almost.

IC's custom 404 page has a link to the site index, but nothing else. It doesn't do much to try to guess where you were trying to go and help you get there. Why? We wanted to make sure it wasn't ambiguous that the page your on is not a real page. It's not a poorly designed page—it's not a page at all. We made an exception for admission: www.ithaca.edu/admission/notreallyapage. We could do that throughout the site. If we know what page they might have been going for, the not-found page could provide some context and relevant links.

We also don't do enough to track down broken links. I do monitor them occassionally, but often there isn't a whole lot I can do. If there's a bug in Web Profile Manager that pervades broken links across many sites, I can address that. We distribute site maintainence to departments across campus, it's up to them to choose their links, and we don't have the resources to adequately monitor those sites.

The 404 page is pretty depressing. It's never what you wanted to see (unless you're writing a blog post that studies them ;-) ), but it's difficult to presume what the user intended when what they specifically requested doesn't exist.