User-Friendly 404 Page

The willmaster.com 404 page was updated recently to be more user friendly. The 404 page suggests certain destinations depending on which subdirectory the person tried to get content from.

I'll describe how we did it.

The code to suggest certain URLs is written in PHP. Thus, the 404 page must be a PHP web page.

In essence, the functionality uses the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable to determine in which directory the failed page was requested from. If the directory is provided for in the code, a suggestion is published on the page.

In pseudo-code, it looks like this:

if directory=DirectoryName
   publish suggestion
else if directory=DifferentDirectoryName
   publish this suggestion
else if directory=StillAnotherDirectoryName
   publish this particular suggestion
end if

Specifying a Custom 404 Page Location

If your 404 page is in a custom location, traffic can be redirected to it by adding this line to the document root .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /custom404.php

Change the location colored blue in the above code to the location of your 404 page.

How to Make the User-Friendly 404 Page

Ensure your 404 page can run PHP code. Generally, that would be a page with a .php file name extension.

Here's an example of PHP code that can be customized for your implementation.

if( strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"/DirectoryName/") === 0 )
{
   echo "Please see <a href='http://example.com/OtherPage.php'>this page</a> for information you might be looking for.";
}

Replace the blue colored directory location with the directory location you want to spot. And replace the red colored link URL with the URL of the suggested page.

Repeat the above code block for each directory to spot, customizing the directory and it's corresponding suggested page. When repeated, the first word of the code block, "if", should be changed to "elseif". Only the first code block should have "if". The second and subsequent code blocks should have "elseif". (It's not strictly necessary to change "if" to "elseif", but it can make the processing of the page some clock ticks faster.)

Here's an example extracted from the willmaster.com custom 404 page.

if( strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"/DealsForYou/") === 0 )
{
   echo "A list of the latest and previous 'Deals for You' is <a href='//www.willmaster.com/DealsForYou/previousindex.php'>at this index page.</a>";
}
elseif( strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"/blog/") === 0 )
{
   echo "Please see <a href='//www.willmaster.com/blog/'>the blog index page</a> for a list of blog posts. (The <a href='//www.willmaster.com/library/'>library</a> may also have information you can use.)";
}
elseif( strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],"/possibilities/") === 0 )
{
   echo "The <a href='//www.willmaster.com/possibilities/'>possibilities page</a> contains the latest issue.";
}

The number of blocks of PHP code you use is limited only by the number of directories you want to spot and publish suggestions for.

Here's an incentive for making a custom 404 page: A user-friendly 404 page may keep people interested rather than disappointed.

(This article first appeared in Possibilities ezine.)

Will Bontrager