 Redirecting Your Visitors to Another Web Page on Error
By
William
Bontrager
You know those "404 not found"
messages you get when you type an incorrect URL. Do your site visitors see
that ugly thing?
There's a simple two-step solution.
(1) Create a page that you want your visitors to see instead of the default
error page. Upload it into a directory somewhere.
(2) Put an .htaccess file into your root directory. (Yes, the first character
of the file name is a period.) Your root directory is where your index file
is, the page they get when people use the URL http://www.yourdomain.com/
If the directory already has an .htaccess file, update it. Otherwise, create
it.
Add this line to the file (with the correct directory path and HTML file
name):
ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/wrongurl.html
"ErrorDocument" tells the server what follows is a method of handling errors.
"404" tells the server what type of error the method is for.
"/path/to/wrongurl.html" is the directory path and file name of the method;
in this case the method is your custom "404 not found" page.
Use a word processor which saves as ASCII/plain text. And upload the file
as text.
Within a few minutes of uploading .htaccess, incorrect URLs will be redirected
to your new error page.
That's all you have to do.
The above works with Unix/Apache servers. If you don't know whether or not
your server qualifies then just go ahead and do the steps above. If it works,
your server qualifies. If it doesn't work, nothing happens; it won't hurt
your server.
Want something more elegant?
Elegance is a program which scans the incorrect URL and automatically redirects
your site visitors to where they really wanted to go.
Introducing ... (drum roll, please) ... Master404 !!!
The newly released Master404 is customizable to your site.
You design your own "404 not found" page, as above. The page can have links
to different areas of your site, or whatever.
Periodically, you use your browser and view the incorrect URLs people are
using. And you assign them to the URLs of the correct pages.
After that, whenever that incorrect URL is used, the visitor is automatically
redirected to the page they really wanted to go to. If no correct page has
been assigned to the incorrect URL, then the visitor is redirected to your
custom "404 not found" page.
Master404 can be found
here. It comes
complete with do-it-yourself manual and examples. Best of all, it's
FREEEE!!!
If you need help with it let me know.
About the Author:
William
Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, "WillMaster Possibilities"
ezine
mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com
Are you looking for top quality scripts? Visit
Willmaster
and check out his highly acclaimed Master Series scripts. Some free, some
for a fee. |
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