Creating a 404 Error Page with Freeway

Nothing's worse than following a link to a website and finding your browsers default 404 page. From a UX perspective, those pages are evil. It's bad enough that the page doesn't exist, but there is no easy way for the visitor to try and find the page they were looking for, or even navigate to your home page!

Create a custom 404 error page with Freeway is really easy, so let's get started:

1. Create a new page, and name it something like "This page doesn't exist!"
2. Change the filename of the page to 404.html
3. Build the page. At there very least, you should have:
   
   1. A non-technical explanation of what went wrong (bonus points if it's humorous!).
   2. A call-to-action. This might just be a link to your home page, or a search field.
   3. The navigation menu and website title.
   4. The default website footer.
4. Add this line to your .htaccess file:

   ErrorDocument 404 http://example.com/404.html

   Obviously, change example.com to your domain. The .htaccess file is located at the domain root (the same place as your index.html file). Keep in mind that the .htaccess file is usually invisible, so you will have to set your FTP client to show hidden files to see it. If it doesn't exist, create a new file using your favorite text-editor, save it as htaccess.txt, then after you upload it to your server rename it to .htaccess.
5. Go a test it!

If you need some inspiration, there's some great 404 error pages here!