how to deal with the 404 page not found error

[ajd335]

i have some errors of 404 page not found when webmaster crawls my site.
i wanted to redirect to my home page when that error occurs.

i donno where should i do the general code for redirection.
I have code of ;

<?php 
//errror404.php 
echo "<font color="#FFFF00" size="3"><center><strong>You have reached a page that has changed or no longer exists. 
      You have been redirected to our index page. Please update your bookmarks!</strong></center></font>";
//Meta refresh to send them back to index.php 
echo "<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=/index.php">"; 
include 'the main page of my website'; 
?> 
 

[Markus]

Right my friend.

Im assuming you want a custom 404 page - if you dont have access to the apache config file, then you can use htaccess.

Create a .htaccess file and put this in the file:

ErrorDocument 404 /404page.html
 

Change the url to a relevant one!

[ajd335]

Right my friend.

Im assuming you want a custom 404 page - if you dont have access to the apache config file, then you can use htaccess.

Create a .htaccess file and put this in the file:

ErrorDocument 404 /404page.html
 

Change the url to a relevant one!

Thanks mark,
i wanted to create the custom 404 search page only...
if i have the access of apache config file,then should i create a new html file in which i should give the link of my home page or should i go for something else..