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404 Error pages

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Make your 404 Page Useful. How many times have you put in the wrong information in the address bar for a blog and been forwarded to their standard 404 page? It happens too often. However, what happens too often is you get one of those default 404 pages that serve no purpose whatsoever. What some of us don’t remember is the 404 Page may actually be one of the first things one of our new visitors may see. For that reason alone, we should make it useful and attractive at the same time. Here are some things you can do to make your 404 error page more useful for both your readers and you. Give them a search option Give your visitors the option to actually search your site for what they might be looking for. Give them a way to contact you If they can’t find what they are looking for, give them a way to contact you to ask for help. Give them some useful links to go to One thing we do on our 404 Page is to give our visitors links to a popular series we are doing. Final thoughts No related posts.

A More Useful 404. Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed. To accomplish this, I developed a custom 404 page that can be adapted to the look and feel of the website it’s used on and uses server-side includes (SSI) to execute a Perl script that determines the cause of the 404 error and takes appropriate action.

Overall design#section1 To provide useful and specific information to the user, it is necessary to define the possible causes of a 404 error. Here are four possible causes: The user mistyped the URL or followed an out-of-date bookmark. In each of these cases, the 404 provides information about the specific cause of the error. Custom 404 page#section2 When an SSI directive such as this one: then, Creating User Friendly 404 Pages. Creating useful 404 pages. A 404 page is what a user sees when they try to reach a non-existent page on your site (because they've clicked on a broken link, the page has been deleted, or they've mistyped a URL).

A 404 page is called that because in response to a request for a missing page, webservers send back a HTTP status code of 404 to indicate that a page is not found. While the standard 404 page can vary depending on your ISP, it usually doesn't provide the user with any useful information, and most users may just surf away from your site. If you have access to your server, we recommend that you create a custom 404 page. A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they're looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further. (Note: This article covers guidelines for creating the content of your custom 404 page.

Because a 404 page can also be a standard HTML page, you can customize it any way you want.