Customize those error pages! - Web Design Article

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Wednesday, 3 December 2008

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Customize those error pages!

By:James Morris

Let me ask you this question. How many times have you made changes to the page structure of your site? Ten times? 100 times? 1000 times? If you have a large site, the number of changes can grow rapidly. This is especially true if you deal with dynamic sites that are driven by a complex scripting language and a database.

Now let me ask you one more question. How many times have you "fat fingered" the keyboard when typing code? I cannot speak for anyone else, but I do it all the time. Now, what happens when you are coding hundreds or thousands of lines of code? Are you going to catch that one little mistake, or are your clients going to catch it?

So, what happens when a link is no longer active on your site, or when you "fat finger" while typing your code and a link cannot be found? Error pages are generated. The most common of these is the 404 error. This error is generated by your web server software to let the end user know that it cannot find the file specified. The big issue here is that this page does not include a link back to your site. And unless you are the server administrator, it may not include your email address, in which case the end user cannot notify you of the dead link.

There is a new trend among hosting providers to capitalize on your dead links. That's right. They are making money from pages that don't exist on your site! You might think this concept is silly, but I assure you, there is big money in error pages. Just think about how many times a day end-users might "fat finger" typing in URLs. Let's just say it happens 1,000 times per day (and I'm probably being conservative here). Now multiply that by an average of $0.10 per click for the credit the host receives when the end-user starts browsing their "convenience page". If you are quick at math, you figured out that that equals $100 per day! Now, if you take into consideration the size of the Internet and start scaling this figure accordingly, you can easily see where this is a seven-figure industry.

What can you do about this? How can you stop your web host from profiting from your visitors without your permission? How can you start getting a piece of this very lucrative pie? The answer is really quite simple.

Most web hosting providers will allow you to customize at least a minimal subset of the configuration parameters of the web server for your hosting account. I'm going to show you exactly how to do this for Apache, the most common web server application on the Internet. Similar steps can be taken for IIS or any other web server application, but I trust that you can use Google™ to find those specific commands.

Ok, the first thing you want to do is come up with a template for your error pages. I suggest you use the basic layout of your site so you can maintain a sense of consistency.

Next, you will need to decide what content to display on the page. You should let your visitors know that they have stumbled across a dead link, but you also want to provide a streamlined method for them to find their way back to your site. I recommend using the appropriate error message in the page title and at the beginning of the page using h1 tags. You should append a description of the error message to your page title and display this description using h2 tags in your page.

Example:

<html>

<head>

<title>Error 404: The page you are looking for was not found</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Error 404</h1>

</h2>The page you are looking for was not found. Please check the URL and try again.</h2>

</body>

</html>

Now you need to provide a easy "one-click" path to your website. This can be accomplished using a simple text link in the page footer.

Example:

<html>

<head>

<title>Error 404: The page you are looking for was not found</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Error 404</h1>

</h2>The page you are looking for was not found. Please check the URL and try again.</h2>

To return to the [Company Name] homepage, click <a href="http://yourdomain.com">here</a>.

</body>

</html>

Now, upload your template as error404.html to your website's root directory (usually public_html).

To get the above template to function correctly when a user comes across an invalid link, all you need to do is create a .htaccess file, using your favorite plain text editor, with the following line in it and place it in the root directory (usually public_html) of your website.

ErrorDocument 404 http://yourdomain.com/error404.html

For each error type you wish to provide a custom page for, simply repeat the above steps, adjusting the file name and ErrorDocument statement appropriately. To gather a complete list of server response codes, search Google™ for "Apache error codes". (Adjust as needed for your server software.)

As you can see, this process is extremely simple and only takes about five minutes. If you are good with HTML and you have a Google AdSense™ account and other affiliate accounts, you can easily customize your template to include your AdSense™ search box and your affiliate links. If you are really savvy, you can use a free script like CaRP (RSS to HTML converter) to provide relevant content on your error pages and further enhance the likelihood of driving the end-user to your site.

Of course, if you are not that good with HTML but still want to retain your customers, there is hope. I've created a very clean template that does all of the above for you. All you have to do is update a few variables in the code and you are ready to go. Simply go to my site and search for MyErrorPages. It's a free script that you are welcome to use on as many sites as you like.

Now that you see how easy it is to customize your error pages and retain your valuable visitors, what are you doing here still? Customize those error pages!

Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com

James Morris is the Co-Owner and Webmaster of MyWebResource: A comprehensive resource site for webmasters, including webmaster articles, webmaster tools, free downloads, and more.

Article published using Article Submitter courtesy of:MyWebResource