The Case of the Broken 404 Page
(and how I fixed it)

This is one of those "ohhh... duh" beginner problems that feels obvious in hindsight but totally confused me at first. I couldn't find a straight answer online, so here's mine — maybe it'll save someone else the head-scratching.

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So I faced this problem… I had coded my not_found page, and it looked alright when I previewed it using the VS Code Live Server, but then I tried it out on my actual site, and it looked like this:

I quickly figured out that it only looks broken when the path is a non-existent page inside a folder.

For example:

• ridvenge.neocities.org/fakepage
  → works fine, shows the styled not found page.
• ridvenge.neocities.org/gallery/fakepage
  → absolutely scuffed.

How I fixed it: Basically, I just make every link point to the root folder.

At first, I linked all my images, links, and CSS as src="image/img.png" because I thought that, since those files are in the same folder as not_found.html, it would find them — but nope!

When you visit a non-existent page, Neocities shows the content of the not_found HTML. It doesn't redirect you to not_found.html. So if the unexist page is inside a folder (ex.ridvenge.neocities.org/gallery/fakepage), the browser tries to find image/img.png relative to that folder, like gallery/image/img.png, which doesn't exist.

So if you're facing the same problem: change all your links to src="/image/img.png" (putting a / first to point to the root directory) and it should work as expected.