There's hardly anyone who wouldn't find 404 error pages to be extremely annoying and frustrating, but there are very few who make the effort to utilize these rather redundant pages across the Internet.

Belgian-based charity Child Focus organization in collaboration with Missing Children Europe (MCE) has come up with a noble and creative idea turn useless 404 error pages into posters of missing children across Europe. Each year thousands of children go missing, and publishing photographs of the missing child is perhaps the most effective way of finding the child; milk cartons being an excellent example.



But this is the digital era and the highly networked nature of the Internet might help some of these children find their way home. All you need to do is take the initiative of providing an otherwise useless space of your website to NotFound.org by downloading their application, who will then automatically display information of a missing child saying "Page not found, neither is this child".

Maryse Roland, spokesperson for Child Focus shares that:

"This project will allow us to once again concentrate the attention on children whom we haven't heard of for many years. These children risk to fall into oblivion. The choice of the shown missing persons message on the 404 page will be at random: it could be a recent disappearance, or on the contrary, a child that has been missing for a long time. We already have a few major partners and invite every business or person with a website to join our project. No financial investment is required, just good will."

At the time of writing this article, more than 1100 websites have signed up for the scheme. They've also provided a button that you can use to recommend a website owner to sign-up for this program.

Once you do chose to participate with NotFound.org, and download their application everything will be automatic from there on; the background page will be of your website, and the missing child poster will be displayed along with their photo, name, age, place they went missing from and a note along with the phone number where someone with any information can contact.




NotFound.org is doing all they can to spread the word across the web and join hands with as many website owners they can. Once they have substantial partners, the organization plans to take complete advantage of geo-location technology to get more information on children missing from a certain area.

It is satisfying to see that there are people who are using technological and digital development for a good cause rather than for their own benefit and we sincerely hope that his project is able to save a child's life. Even if one child is brought home, I would say that the project is a huge success, what do you say?

NotFound.org

Via