Customising 404 error pages

[WhiteRabbit]

Hi all,

Is it possible to amend/customise the 404 error page? And if so, where would I find the appropriate field/source code?

Cheers,

Giles

[Dave]

Hi Giles, As far as I am aware it is not possible for us to customise this within Bluepark and you would need to discuss with Rich and his team at Bluepark to see if this was possible.

[WhiteRabbit]

Thanks Dave - I've dropped an email to Rich.

I'll post back here with the results so it's available to all

[WhiteRabbit]

No reply regarding this from Bluepark - despite 2 emails

[Dave]

No reply regarding this from Bluepark - despite 2 emails

Very unusual as the support from Bluepark is excellent. Why not give them a quick call?

[Rich]

I have to say we've received no emails from you so far. It could be that you're being caught by our Cloudmark spam filter, although it's almost of unheard of for this to happen with legitimate email. As Dave says, we respond to all email remarkably promptly.

Unfortunately, however, there is no way to edit the 404 page. On the plus side, the page is far more friendly than the typical default browser page, as it contains a link to the homepage and also a search box to help the user to find what they're looking for.

[WhiteRabbit]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the reply - I was going to call today but ran out of time.

Weird that the emails didn't turn up...although I've known stranger things happen!

Shame about the 404 customisation - admittedly it's not bad...just could be that little bit better. I read a statistic recently that over 50% of people who view a 404 assume that the site's knackered and try elsewhere.

[Green East]

50% of people who view a 404 assume that the site's knackered and try elsewhere.

I would assume the same probably - lesson learned there!
I re-keyworded my site last week including some page titles, which means until they get re-indexed and the old links removed from indexing, there will be a host of 404's. I clicked on one myself to see what the error would look like, when it displayed a big 404 I didn't read further to see if my link was there. I came here to look for custom pages.

You are such and informative lot, thankyou :-D I went back to Google and tried the 404 again and sure enough, my link was between the 404 and the "search" box. I hadn't seen it.

If you ever do come up with the custom option Rich, I'll be in queue. Meanwhile I will try not to break any links LOL.

[Stix]

Hi - was hunting around to see if this was possible. BP do a cracking job of introducing new features and responding to customer feedback so wondered if this had been introduced as it has been a while since the last post.

[Dave]

Hi, As far as I know nothing has changed and it is still not possible to modify the 404 error pages!

[john]

Rich is very reluctant to let us do anything ourselves on his servers, it's a shame we can't have 404's like this
[IMG]file:///C:/Users/John/Desktop/soocial404.jpg[/IMG]
http://www.prezziesplus.co.uk/user/soocial404.jpg

View now for 2 days only!!

[Adva Trading]

Let's take this concept one step forward. One page (your design is great) for female browsers, a different one for males... ? ...Richards, do we have the technology?

[Neil]

Surprised you want your customers to see you like that john!!!

[john]

Surprised you want your customers to see you like that john!!!

Not really, only Mish Moneypenny!

[Neil]

I think even if the website logo could placed on this page it would at least show that the site is still working and the potentail customer is more likely to read the page, instead of simply clicking back.

Can this be done richard?

[Adva Trading]

I think even if the website logo could placed on this page...

Actually, can we designate an image for this purpose instead of the logo?

[Red Devil]

Can't see why BP users can't have a personalised 404 page. If they don't create one, then it defaults to the BP one. It just needs to be part of Page Manager using a standard page name. If it needs to reside at "root level" on the server, then there should be the facility for it to be copied there through the BP Admin. Only HTML allowed, no scripts.

[dan1el]

I would love to see this feature as well, any updates?

[Dave]

I would love to see this feature as well, any updates?

This was done in an update at the backend of last year. Taken from the latest updates:-

It has long been requested to be able to designate a page as a custom 404 error page, this is now possible via Configuration:Site. Simply specify the page name, this can be an existing page in your Page Manager (such as "error.html") or a static ".htm" file in your user directory (please note that uploaded files should terminate in ".htm"). This custom 404 error page will only be displayed for well-formed URLs, i.e. pages, products, categories and news articles which cannot be found.

[little-linguist]

Yes, this was added in December 2010.

This was the update issued on 12/12/10:

It has long been requested to be able to designate a page as a custom 404 error page, this is now possible via Configuration: Site. Simply specify the page name, this can be an existing page in your Page Manager (such as "error.html") or a static ".htm" file in your user directory (please note that uploaded files should terminate in ".htm"). This custom 404 error page will only be displayed for well-formed URLs, i.e. pages, products, categories and news articles which cannot be found.