Many people are surprised how important a 404 page can be, some have no idea what it is or what it does. I’ve been there.

What is it? When some one visits your website from a link somewhere else and that web-page is no longer there, the surfer will get a 404 page. By default it is just a standard browser page that says “Document not found”. How blah is that? Even worse, it does’nt give the best impression of your website. But stuff happens, some times it can’t be helped.

There are a few ways you can turn the missing page problem around for you.

The easiest way is to forward them to your main or index page, most won’t even notice. It’s not exactly the page they were looking for, but it sure beats the ugly default 404 text showing up.  Another option is to create a custom 404 page. If you can make a web-page, you can make your own 404 page, that’s all you are doing is making a web-page and saving it as 404.html

Along the same lines, many people will create a 404 page to sell products or services. The only problem with this is that if the offer does not match what the surfer was coming to your page for, will you sell them? If they came to your web-page to buy a dog and your custom 404 page is selling cats, will you sell them?

One more thing to learn, what an htaccess file is. This little file can control many things on your webpage including 404 pages. This file is saved or named as .htaccess, this is a period before the file and no extension, also make sure to save it as a text file.

This is how the file will look, you are welcome to copy and paste:

RewriteEngine On

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/404.html

Of course you will need to change http://www.yoursite.com to of course your sites url. You can also create your page as 404.hm if you prefer to use that extension for your pages, just make sure to change the .htacess file to reflect the different file name. As I mentioned, if you would rather forward all 404 errors to your index page, simply change the http://www.yoursite.com/404.html  to http://www.yoursite.com. Basically the line ErrorDocument 404 tells your website what to do with a 404 error.

Easy Peasy.



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