Most of the time I (like all webmasters) try to avoid 404 errors for my visitors.В Sometimes however you get old addresses that don’t exist any longer, or even worse if something on the server isn’t responding and you get a 503 error.В These things are really unavoidable.В Even though we try to lessen the occurance of such errors as much as possible they will still happen from time to time.
That’s why it’s good that with almost any server (depending upon how much access your web host gives you) you should be able to edit these error pages and give your visitors valuable content.В Even if your web host does not give you that kind of control it is still possible to serve up custom 404 pages via PHP.В In fact WordPress has it built in, all you need do is change you 404 page within your template and you can do what you like with it.
The question always comes up as to what kind of content you put on a 404 page.В Personally I try to make it as valuable as possible to my viewers.В On a WordPress blog I will most frequently put the latest posts with links to them with a 404 message.В If it’s not a wordpress blog I like to put a few RSS feeds from my other blogs and let people find me the content they want that way.
