Error Pages

How many times have you been surfing the web and come across a plain old boring "default" 404 page?

It is quite possible that we can misspell the URL of the site or some directories, which is not permissible for user. Most of these situations ended up in the dreadful page or something which makes user to feel that either your site is not existing or has lost somewhere. If this happens then someone will most likely leave altogether.

Would not it be nice if it could let us or visitors know that even though the requested page might not be there any more, the site is still around... Y ou can configure it to instruct the browser to display custom error messages rather than the dull and unhelpful generic ones.

You can avert all this by setting custom error pages, if you own your own domain name. Custom Error Page is the feature of the web server software that allows replacing the default error messages with one you create i.e. custom-designed page that soothes you with friendly suggestions and/or provide better recovery navigation (pointers to alternate links).

This way when someone try to access one of the pages through a broken link they will be taken to your custom professional looking 404 Custom error page instead of the basic page not found one. If they try to access a page that is forbidden they will be taken to your custom professional looking 403 custom error page instead of the basic "Access Forbidden" page.

You can also provide the link back to your home page on these custom pages, so the visitor could go there and take a look at what your site has to offer.

Custom error pages are simple, normal HTML pages and therefore can be created just as easily as the other pages on your site. There are probably just 4 or 5 pages for which custom pages are useful. Custom error pages also help your site in ranking the search engine.

It is not difficult to make useful and helpful error pages. But Web hosting companies makes it simpler by just facilitating you to provide the link of the customized pages or creates it, in the provided hosting control panel.

You can also include a simple site map, with links to the main site pages, in each custom error page. You could also include a drop down menu with links to your main pages or a site search box.