This is an archived tutorial from the kirupa.com legacy collection. It covers software that may no longer be available, but it is kept online because the ideas still hold up.
A cool trick you can entice your visitors with is custom error pages. When a page on your server is not found, your visitors will normally see their browser's default message such as "Page cannot be displayed." If you used a custom error page though, your visitors will see your page. For example, click on the following link and see the kirupa.com site's custom 404 page: http://www.kirupa.com/blah.htm
404 Error pages will ONLY work if you are using it on a domain. Sub-domains (something.your-site.com or http://www.your-site.com/something) will NOT work.
Here's How:
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Create an HTML file for your 404 page. It could be anything you would like. It could be just simply 404 on a blank page.. or it could be your layout that includes the 404 words in it.. it's all up to you.
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Save that file in any file format you want (html, php etc;) and upload it to your webserver. You can either keep it in your main or root directory, or you can create a subfolder. If you're only going to be using one (404) then I suggest just leaving it in your root folder.
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Press start > Run > type "notepad" (in mac, just open a text editor) now you will take this code below, and put it into your text editor:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/404.htm
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Remember, change the URL in the above code to the path of your 404 page on your server.
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Now file > save as > htaccess.txt | save it somewhere that you will remember.
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Upload the HTACCESS.TXT folder to your webserver. (Make sure it's in the home or root directory)
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Rename the file (will be different for different ftp clients) to .HTACCESS (make sure there is a "." before HTACCESS and NO ".txt" after HTACCESS)
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And there you go! You should be good to go. There are also other error pages available such as internal error, forbidden etc; search google for these .. and then its just a matter of adding that code to your .htaccess file and making another error document (like your 404 page).
Any questions? PM redViper in the forums.
Regards,
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redViper N3XT MEDIA |
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