Custom 404 error page not displaying correctly

[pwdruk]

Hi All,

Newbie to this forum and complete noob to web design. Got asked by my brother-in-law to update his site and so have been tinkering with it.

I've updated the site with new content, which resulted in other sites still linking to old, non-existing content and thus, 404 errors.

I've created the following basic .htaccess file containing only:

ErrorDocument 404 /not_found.php

I've created a custom 404 not_found.php and placed it in the same directory. All seems to work well when the wrong url is entered eg.:
URL:
[coltgap.com ]

as opposed to:

URL:
[coltgap.com ]

However, the custome 404 page does not display correctly when another directory is added to the URL, eg:
[coltgap.com ]

It is clearly the same custom 404 page displayed in both instances, but I am clueless as to why it won't display it correctly when it's 'invoked' (for the lack of a better description) from a non-existant directory.

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

[penders]

Your 404 page seems to display OK for me in both cases. I'm guessing that you may not have had full paths to your CSS/JS/IMG files... these need to be absolute (or root-relative) paths.

BUT... if pages have moved to a new URL, then you should be redirecting from the old to the new, with a permanent 301 redirect, so search engines (and users) will pick up the new content. You should not return a 404 in this instance if you can help it.

[pwdruk]

Thank you for the response. I am at a loss, I did not have full paths to my CSS/JS/IMG files until yesterday. After fixing the full paths, the links from the incorrectly displayed custom 404 page worked for the first time, but the page itself still displayed incorrectly.

I checked the link again after your response, as well as all other backlinks, and the custom page now displays correctly in all scenarios.

I have not done anything to it since then. Regardsless, it seems sorted now.

A very usefull forum indeed, thanks!

[lucy24]

but the page itself still displayed incorrectly

:: peering into crystal ball ::

Did/does your error page contain relative links to related files such as images or stylesheets?

[g1smd]

Your browser may have cached incorrect views.

Be sure that links to images and stylesheets begin with a leading slash and specify the full path to the file.

You cannot use relative links because the 404 error page is served at the non-valid URL, and that could be any number of folders deep.