Customised error pages are an excellent way to make your site look a lot more professional and retain customers who could potentially be discouraged from you site by a coding error leading to broken links. Error pages are defined as follows:

400 - Bad Request

401 - Authorization Request (generally visitors don’t have required access credentials to password protected directories)

403 - Forbidden (user’s don’t have required access credentials)

404 - Not Found (broken link - a link to a page that doesn’t exist within your site)

500 - Internal Server Error (generally a PHP/MySQL/ASP problem - please contact our support department if you are continually receiving Internal Server Error messages)

Clicking on the Custom Error Pages icon will bring up a list of the above mentioned error pages. Clicking on any of the icons will bring up a window where you can copy and paste your code for custom error pages into a text field and save it. The easiest way to do this is to design is graphically in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, switch to the code view and select all the code displayed in the code window. Copy all the selected code, paste it into the text field and click ‘Save’.

The page also contained buttons which will insert dynamic features such as the URL from which the broken link came (referring URL), the IP address of the user, the requested URL which was not found, the server name (in our case this will be in the form of [servername].600host.co.uk, the visitor’s browser details (generally IE6/7 or a version of Mozilla Firefox) and the redirect status code (404, etc).

Using these features can give your site a more professional look and help visitors reporting errors to your site’s webmaster in establishing the cause of the error.