Customizable 404 page (Resource Not Found error)
Currently
If someone mistypes an address on your site, or clicks an old link to a page that you may have deleted they get a standard blue "Resource not found" error. While there is a "home" and "back" button to take people either to your site or the referring page, there is no branding on it as well as any identification that this goes with your site.
Desired
In the same way that Wild Apricot lets you create a customizable Authorization required message for people who try to access content that is in a Restricted area, have the ability to create a custom "Resource not found" page or message. This would let you create a custom message to let people know what they can do next, and also provide your organization's branding so that the wayward visitor feels safe.
anonymous_206.223.175.10
shared this idea
Released in 5.0
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GLTF
commented
We, probably like most WA clients, migrated from a previous website. That previous site was already integrated throughout the web, with links to us from all over and comprehensive search engine results.
So when we switched to WA, we lost all of that value because our pages are not named the same so any hard links to our site are now broken and when you search for us, you get a lot of defunct links. The obvious solution is to name the pages the same, but for various reasons that is not always possible or desirable.
I would ideally like a way to cusomize a .htaccess file as well as a 404 error page. However, I recognize that might be overkill and cumbersome for WA to integrate. So my suggestion is to offer a catch all, customizable 404 error page. So any page that is within our domain, but does not have a current page, would go to this 404 error page. This would improve user experience, minimize lost leads, and capitalize on existing SEO.
For an even simpler solution, you could, by default, make the 404 error page an automatically generated sitemap from our WA site and let us just put a little intro text on it, like you do for the directory search.
Loosing our existing equity in SEO was a big blow to our club.
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Corey Creed
commented
Is there any way we can create a custom 404 error page? Whenever someone comes to my site and tries to go to a page that does not exist, they just get an error. It does not say how to get back to my home page.
This is especially important with the new "friendly urls". If anyone that is already using WA sends someone to an old page, it simply gives an error.
This prevents me from using the function. There are other sites that link to my pages. If I change the name, the link breaks.
Simple 301 redirects would fix this.
A custom 404 error page would be nice too.
Corey
