Arduino to the rescue.

You can get add on boards to make your Arduino more functional. Seeed (available at Radio Shack and other fine companies) makes several boards that are price competive.)   I bought the Seeed ethernet add-on board for half the price of the Arduino option, but it was a bit trimed down such as no card slot. The board also works with the Osepp Arduino clones. That is what we used for this project.

 

I wanted a way to have a temporary web server up when I needed to bring the regular web server down.  The Arduino was the perfect choice. I just took the web server example from the Arduino IDE and commented out the code that was not needed (but could be reused later) and added the code that was needed i.e.


...
          client.println("<center>");

          client.println("<h1>Your server name<h1>");
          client.println("<hr");
          client.println("<br />");

          client.println("<h2>Bear with us as the server is under reconstruction!</h2>");
          client.println("<img src='http://www.seemyheart.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Website_Under_Construction.gif' height=500 width=500 />");
          client.println("</center>");
...

Now I have a way to keep a web presence if I need to alter the server for a short period of time without the usual web page being up. Our Arduinos: