Creating a Custom 404 Page

A 404 page is a page that is displayed when a page is not found on your site. The standard Internet Explorer 404 page appears as this:

Instead, why not show a page customized to your own site, including a link to your homepage, or created to look like your regular webpage with the complete headers, footers and site navigation, with a message that the page cannot be found where the page's main content would normally go.

To create a custom 404 page, you need to have access to you.htaccess file. It is normally hidden, so you will need to set your FTP client to view all invisible files. Some hosts do not allow clients to modify the .htaccess file, but some do allow it when it is requested. Others have no restrictions on client access to this file, while others are happy to make requested changes for you.

Sometimes, your website's control panel allows you to supply a URL to appear as your 404 page. Some have this feature built in, and entering a specific URL is all you need to do to activate your custom 404 page. The control panel will modify your .htaccess file for you automatically. Since this is easiest, do check for this feature first, before following the steps to modify your .htaccess yourself.

You will need to add the following line to your .htaccess file, or you will need to create a new file (saved as .htaccess) in NotePad or TextPad. It should contain:

You can rename the /notfound.html file to anything you like, as long as the page contains the page you would like to show when there is a 404 error.

Next, create the page you want to display as your 404 page. A "Sorry, this page has moved" without any links is useless to your visitor that may have ended up there. You want this page to be as useful as possible to keep the visitor on the site.

You should also create your page using all absolutel URLs instead of relative. This means everything should be done as "www.example.com/page.html" rather than "/page.html". This is because a visitor might be deep in the directory levels, resulting in broken images and invalid links.

Next, upload your new .htaccess file, and your notfound.html (or whatever you named it) file. Then check by typing in a URL you know does not exist on your site (ie. http://www.example.com/wgqagwgqgr.html) and check that your 404 page came up correctly.

If you decide you want to edit your custom 404 page, simply modify the notfound.html file. If you want to rename the file for whatever reason, you will then need to go and modify your .htaccess file again.

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