When your blog has been up for any length of time, things are bound to change. You may decide to remove a post, or you change a category, or any number of things might happen that will cause a visitor to click through to a link that just isn’t there. Your server probably has a generic “404″ file, you know the ones, black on white, with no way to get back to the main page of your site. If you use WordPress, chances are good that your template has a 404 page already, which is definitely better as it still looks like your template, with your sidebars, header and footer intact and links to your archives, categories, etc. While this is definitely a marked improvement, you might want to take it even further. I added a graphic to my template’s pre-existing 404 file and removed some of the information that I thought was overkill. Here’s mine: 404 page not found.

If you’re using WordPress, it’s super easy. Just go into your dashboard, and under “Appearance” click on “Editor”. On the right side of the page, you’ll see a list of your templates. Click on “404 Template” or “404.php” or something similar. In the editor window you’ll see the code for your 404 template. Copy and paste it into a text editor so that if you make a mistake and can’t figure out what you did wrong, you’ll have the original code to start over.

Open up another window and navigate to your own 404 page. You can do this by typing your domain name followed by something you know isn’t a category or page on your site… i.e. http://yourdomain.com/belching – provided you don’t have an area of your site dedicated to belching, this should bring you to your 404 page.

Now decide if you want a graphic. You’ll have to play around with sizes, depending on the template you’re using, but I found the size 550×600 to work for me. Create your graphic, add whatever information you’d like and upload to your server. Get creative. Remember you can always change it. If you don’t want a graphic you can skip this part.

Go back to the editor window and find the line that says something like “The page you are looking for no longer exists.” or “404, not found” or something like that. that’s going to be the top of your page. If you can’t figure it out, find the area that says “get footer” and look just above that for your main area. I put the code to display my image:

<a href=”http://colormepink.com”><img src=”http://colormepink.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/cmp404.png”></a>

Notice, I link the graphic to the home page, so that if the visitor doesn’t want to be bothered reading, they can just click it. I chose to remove my archives by date because there were just too many, but I left the archives by page and by category.

So go create one for yourself, here’s some creative inspiration. Come back and leave a link to your creation. I’d love to see it!

If all else fails, this gun’s for hire.