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An elegant solution for missing web pages

February 15, 2008

Sooner or later somebody is going to try and access a page on your site that doesn’t exist. What will happen? Chances are the visitor will see a page saying something like ‘Error (404) Page Not Found’ with perhaps a bit of blurb promoting your web hosting company. The visitor will go somewhere else and that place may not be your site!

All visitors should be cherished. They should given every opportunity to reach and stay on your site. You don’t have to settle for that useless standardised error page. You can substitute it with something of your own that will gracefully get the visitor back on track.

Your custom error page should contain the following information:

A polite headline such as “Sorry, page not found”.
A message to explain what has happened and put the visitor at ease. Something like “The page address that you entered or selected was not found. This is usually caused by a mis-typed web address, a relocated page or an error in a link to this site.”
Some further text containing a link to your home page and / or an alternative suitable page.
If your site has a Site Map page, a link to that.
A link to your Contact page.
Your main navigation menu.

All of which should be contained in your standard page framework so that the visitor immediately realises he/she has reached your site.

This is what my “Page Not Found” page looks like.

Now the techie bit. Once you have uploaded your custom page, you need to tell your web server to use it. If in doubt, get a suitably experienced technician to make these changes as a wrong step could cause serious problems accessing your site.

If your site is hosted on a Unix server, you need to add the following line lines to the .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /page_not_found.htm

where /page_not_found.htm is the path and name of your custom page.

If your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server, open your Internet Service Manager. The following steps may vary slightly depending on the version of IIS that you are using.

Click on the site you want to set your custom error page for.
Select Properties and then Custom Errors.
Scroll down to the file associated with a 404 error page and enter the path and name of your custom error page.

Finally, test it by going to an invalid address on your site. If all has gone to plan you should see your elegant custom error page.

Filed in: Usability