Turning a WordPress error into an opportunity with a custom 404 page

Unfortunately, the vast majority of website designers and operators view the 404 error, which occurs when a page is not found, as a dead end.

This page is often given a simple message that just states merely, “Sorry! There’s nothing here.” With WordPress, however, there absolutely can be something there when a user navigates to a page that is no longer there, has moved, or has been deleted.

The unique setup of pages and templates within the Dashboard allows this page to be as dynamic as any other page within the WordPress ecosystem.

Don’t let a drab and unhelpful 404 page be the end of a user’s journey through your website. Instead, turn it into an opportunity for further reading, redirection to the content a user may have been looking for, or a suggestion of where to go when the website’s navigation offers no obvious answers.

It’s time to create a 404 error page using the WordPress Dashboard

Installing a WordPress theme can be a hodgepodge effort, where some pages are included and others were left out of the template for reasons of expedience or other considerations. The 404 error page seems to be one which is not consistently included in every WordPress theme, and some custom design authors even leave it out of their own, self-designed website interfaces. That means that a good number of users will have to create their own 404 error page before they can add content and redirect users to a site’s best features.

Creating a 404 error page is generally done using FTP to create the initial PHP file that will contain basic theme code. It can then be edited using built-in tools contained within the WordPress Dashboard itself. To create a 404 error page for a theme that simply does not have one at all, open up an FTP client and navigate to the theme’s main directory. This can typically be found by navigating through the following site path:

/public_html/wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME

How to make a WordPress site

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management software solution, with more than 60 million users around the world. With a community that large, it’s only logical that the development community is appropriately robust itself.

As adoption of WordPress continues to increase worldwide, more and more theme developers are bringing their private skills to the public marketplace.

They do this by offering custom WordPress themes either for free or for a small price, and they demonstrate each theme’s appearance using a demo site.

This is far different from simply displaying an image of the theme in action. Instead, a theme demo site actually lets users peruse an entire, complete WordPress installation with the theme in action. This actually helps to sell users on a theme, as enabling them to use the theme itself proves its usefulness and high quality.

This can be done by any user of WordPress 3.0 (or higher) more than a single extra plugin. All it requires is enabling one of the new WordPress “sleeper” features that goes unnoticed, and unused, by all but the most advance WordPress customers. Here’s how it’s done.

WordPress networks: the key to a theme demo site with WordPress 3.x

Previous versions of WordPress before the 3.x line of releases were big on using plugins to make a theme demo site. And this process wasn’t simplified by simply installing one plugin; instead, the vast array of features a user required often meant that they’d have to enable two, three, or even four plugins and widgets to get the job done. With WordPress Networks, this is essentially a deprecated way of creating a theme demo site.

Enabling WordPress Networks will require a bit of PHP knowledge, as well as some basic coding of server files like .htaccess. It will use the Dashboard to perform most of the setup, and then the user will simply modify a few files to complete the process. After that, new sites can be created to display the content of WordPress themes within one website.