Just did a bit of a tweak to my site to address something that I always thought sucked, but never really looked into: 404s.

404s traditionally are ugly, and unhelpful. They say “can’t find what you’re looking for” and that’s about it. With the advances since PHP and CMS’s have come about, this doesn’t have to be the case. So, I’ve replaced my previously stock, and ugly, 404 page with the wonderful 404 info from Yoast, as well as implemented an HTML sitemap as per his other post here. The only other thing I did was modify the 404 page a bit so that if someone tries to look for a file on my site that’s a PNG, GIF, JPG, JS, etc, they get a basic “file not found”. This code came from here.

It’s all pretty boring, but I think it’ll make the user experience of my site a bit more friendly. And it’s more inline with Google’s current thoughts about 404 pages.