Guest Post: A quick and easy way to present your message on your blog or website’s 404 error page.

When someone requests a page that’s not on your site, they see the 404 (page not found) error page. But it doesn’t need to be a sterile “that page doesn’t exist” page — the one above is from JudyDouglass.com. I love the idea of using a custom error page to communicate the gospel!

Think about ways that you can use your 404 page to educate, encourage, or entertain. Hopefully your site is organized well enough that people won’t see the page often, but they will eventually — it might as well be a positive experience! You can also provide suggestions or list the content on your site like wordpress.com does automatically.  This example is eQuipping for eMinistry’s 404 page:

Here’s the page that you used to get from Mars Hill Church (the inspiration for this post):

Depending on how you’re hosting your web site, there are different ways to customize your error pages. If you’re using WordPress.org, your theme might have a custom 404 page template as described here. If this option is not included with your theme, check your web hosting company’s help files or contact your local web developer.

This post was adapted from my post, Communicate your message through a custom 404 error page.

 Guest Post by Karl Kranich

Karl and his wife, Liesl, have served with Cru for 23 and 21 years respectively. They have one daughter, Anja, and live in Indiana. They serve with Keynote after serving at headquarters for many years.

Karl blogs tech and miscellaneous stuff at karl.kranich.org and tweets @karlkranich.