When someone is trying to access a page on
your site and either the page has been moved or the link was misspelled both Internet
Explorer and Netscape will display error pages. If this happens that someone will most
likely leave altogether and you'll never see him or her again.

You can prevent this happening as a result
of broken links and other errors however if you own your own domain name by setting up
what's called custom error pages. This way when someone try's to access one of your pages
through a broken link they'll be taken to your custom professional looking 404 error
page instead of the basic ''page not found'' one. If they try to access a page that
is forbidden they'll be taken to your custom professional looking 403 error page instead
of the basic "Access Forbidden" page.

On these custom pages you could have a link
back to your home page 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,
however getting them to show up is a little more difficult and as mentioned before you
must have your own domain name.

Here's what to do:

First off you need to check out the website directory where your index.html file is
located for a file called .htaccess. Most of the time you'll find it but sometimes you'll
have to create it yourself. If you have it you should look for code similar to below and
change it to suit your directory. If the below lines of code aren't there simply add them
below everything else. If the .htaccess file isn't there simply create it and then type
in the following lines:

ErrorDocument 400 color="#ff0000">URL/error400.html

ErrorDocument 401 URL/error401.html

ErrorDocument 403 URL/error403.html

ErrorDocument 404 URL/error404.html

Keep each piece of ErrorDocument code on one
line with a space on each side of the number 40?. This code is case sensitive so be sure
to check the case of the E and D in ErrorDocument before you proceed.

The code in black stays the same all the
time, the URL is the address of the directory in which the error page is located and the
error40?.html page is the individual error page itself. The individual page can be called
anything but for convenience sake it's best to go for a descriptive name like
error40?.html

When your done creating a new file make sure
to upload it. If you've edited the current one make sure to save it, then be sure to use
the CHMOD command through your FTP program or online file manager to set the permissions
to 644.

ErrorDocument 404 is the code associated
with link rot which we talked about earlier but here's a run down.

400 - Bad Request

401 - Unauthorized

403 - Access Forbidden

404 - Page Not Found

Nearly finished now, but before we are you
should test your new error pages by typing in a URL that you know doesn't exist on your
server. You should get your custom 404 error page (if your 404 error page works
all your error pages should work) ready to bring in the lost visitors that may be out
there.