custom 404 as a brochure page

[winsbury]

We have a revamped website which means a lot of orphaned incoming links from google and bookmarks etc which are creating 404 errors. So, have created a friendly 404 error landing page within the brochure using the main site template and put the relevant line in .htaccess to redirect to /acatalog/error404.html.

But... although the redirect serves up the correct page, none of the navigation links work nor does the css, clearly there is a path problem of some sort.

If instead we use the full url in .htaccess eg: http://www.tld.com/error404.html as suggested elsewhere in this forum (in spite of this not being the recommended Apache config) then the links and css work okay but the page gives a 302 response to crawlers which is not at all what we want as the old pages are obsolete.

Any ideas how to have to keep the error pages easy to maintain within the brochure and yet still serve the proper 404 response to crawlers?

[KarenBM]

any update on this?

[winsbury]

It was a while back that I solved this but ended up having to makeg a standalone 404 page outside of Sellerdeck and manually uploading it because Sellerdeck has a variety of trip-u-ups with regards base url and changing urls upon publishing.

[graphicz]

1. Look at previewed/published home page, view source, select all.
2. Paste into Notepad++ or Dreamweaver
3. look for

<!--[sd.hide]
   
      <Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/" FORCED=1 />  


[sd.hide]-->

Change it completely to

<base href="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/" target="_self" />

4. look for

<div id="left-area">                
                <div class="content-area content-minus-two">

and

<br clear="all" />
                </div>		  
                  <div id="left-sidebar">
				<div class="sidebar">

Delete all between and write your 404 text and a home page link and some other soothing stuff.

5. Preview. Make sure page displays OK. Upload to site root, the same place as you see index.html and the acatalog folder.
6. Test in a browser and if all is well write it into your htaccess.
****
Some people use a 404 page in the root and 301 it to a brochure page but I don't think this is compliant. I would happily be corrected.

To be fair it doesn't need changing that often and once you have done it it does become very quick to do.

[EdHarrison]

I used a hidden brochure page and the simple ErrorDocument 404 /acatalog/404.html line in the htaccess file via FTP.

I dont know if it is best practice but it works avoiding 404 errors.

[graphicz]

My understanding is (and I am no expert) that the 404 has to be in the site root. Happy to be corrected.