specialized "down_for_maintanance" page

My wife passed away this week and I want to put up a "In Memory of: " page that simply states "In Memory of [my wife's name] followed by a simple statement that customer service and shipping will resume on January 28.

I want to provide a means for customer's to click through to a normal store operation so they can continue to browse the store and make purchases having been informed up front about the delay in shipping.

I have produced a html page I named ASmem.html which contains the message and entered it in Admin-> Configuration-> Website Maintenance filename.

This throws a server error from my host.

Can anybody help me, I'm not able to think this one out very well under my current cirumstances.

First of All Sorry For You Loss!

Second. There is no need to go through the hassle of reconfiguring the Maintenance page if you allow customer to continue purchase.
Your message or html block can be placed in your common/tpl_main_page.php. Or any other index page it all depends where exactly you want it to be displayed, whether inside the center column, or in the header, or all the way at the top outside the website content.

CoolCarPartsOnline:

First of All Sorry For You Loss!

Second. There is no need to go through the hassle of reconfiguring the Maintenance page if you allow customer to continue purchase.
Your message or html block can be placed in your common/tpl_main_page.php. Or any other index page it all depends where exactly you want it to be displayed, whether inside the center column, or in the header, or all the way at the top outside the website content.

Thanks for response. I do want the "in memory of" page to stand by itself as a full screen white page with the very simple statement and a means to click through to the regular shop.
Won't modifying the main page template affect all pages in the shop?

I have been trying to do a redirect in the .htaccess file to accomplish this but that's not working either. Been awhile since I was involved in any redirects. Here's what I had and maybe someone can tell me what I did wrong. I even tried to redirect (as you see here) to one of my other sites to pickup up the new page.

 
IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*
<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>
AuthName [URL="http://www.un-du.net/"]www.un-du.net[/URL]
AuthUserFile /home/undu/www/www/_vti_pvt/service.pwd
AuthGroupFile /home/undu/www/www/_vti_pvt/service.grp
redirect 301 / [URL="http://www.aspenshopsonline.com/ASmem.html"]http://www.aspenshopsonline.com/ASmem.html[/URL]
redirect 301 /crw [URL]http://www.un-du.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=31[/URL]
redirect 301 /cwr [URL]http://www.un-du.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=31[/URL]
redirect 301 /California [URL]http://www.un-du.net/VOC[/URL]