We’re a young company. Our average employee age is 30-something. Many of us have young kids at home, kids who walk to school, play at the amazing parks that Traverse City has to offer and generally live the carefree life that every child should be so lucky to enjoy. While we wander with our kids through quiet neighborhoods and watch over them as they play, somewhere in the back of our minds rests a warning that helps us maintain a constant vigilance when it comes to their safety: not everyone is as in love with life as we are.
While the problem of missing and exploited children may be the furthest thing from a parent’s mind when surfing the web, one Mr. Gary Smith thinks that he has found the perfect solution to the always present problem that officials and families face when attempting to spread the word about a missing child, that problem being that there never seems to be enough sources through which to spread that message.
Smith also, inadvertently, has offered up a solution to the web’s most annoying and least utilized web properties: the 404 error page.
Smith’s idea comes from his life of work with missing and exploited children. His group, notfound.org, has launched an effort to recruit companies, webmasters, site owners and site designers who are willing to hand over space on their 404 error pages. As you can see from the picture attached to this post, the error page would no longer be a blank white space or a cutesie corporate message, it would, instead, serve an actual purpose. It would highlight children who have gone missing and have yet to be found.
Millions of web users encounter a 404 page every day. Usually, those users click the back button and continue to surf. Smith’s idea brings actual usefulness to that 404 page. If his idea catches on, those millions of folks stumbling across a 404 page will get a quick glimpse of a child that is missing, one that may be in their area. These millions may have not come across that information otherwise. While this concept is currently being pushed in Europe, it wouldn’t take any more time or effort at all to bring it across the pond and enact it here in the USA.
It is because of the vital work that this simple page would do and of the relative ease of implementation (indeed, even though each site has the option to customize their 404 page, most choose to leave it blank) that Smith’s project is our Tiny Titan for this week.
All any brand or site needs do is allow a small line of html and the NotFound project can then run the information on each child. Simple, smart, vital, effective. We dig it! At the moment, over 400 European sites have signed on. We’re hoping this idea catches on over here as well!
