SEO INFO

When visitors to your site misspell your URLs, or follow broken links to your pages, their browser will display a ‘404 Error’ page that will tell them that the page they were trying to access does not exist.  At this point, they will most likely leave, rather than trying to guess how to get to their intended destination.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this problem: create a user-friendly custom ‘404 Error’ page.

If you own your domain, your web host will most likely offer you the possibility of uploading a custom ‘404 Error’ page, which will be automatically displayed every time somebody tries to access a non existent URL within your domain.

You can design your custom error page using the same editor you normally use to create your regular web pages. There are a few things you can take into account when designing your error page, to provide your visitors with the best possible user experience:

• Brand your error page with your logo and the look and feel of your site.
• Provide your visitors with a link to your main page (homepage).
• Include a link to a site map, or display links to the main sections of your site.
• Include a search box for those visitors who don’t want to take time to navigate your site to find the information they need, so they can just type-in their selected keywords, and immediately get a list of all the relevant pages within your site.

To upload your custom ‘404 Error’ page, ask your webhost or visit their website for directions.  Most web hosts use Cpanel, a popular interface that allows webmasters to perform website management and control tasks. If your web host is using Cpanel, log in and go to the main menu, where you will see a link to the ‘Custom Error Pages’ section.   After following that link, you will be able to easily upload your custom ‘404 Error’ page using a built-in web based HTML editor (just cut and paste the HTML of your custom error page and click the ‘upload’ button).

Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer, who focuses on web design and Internet marketing topics.  He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources.  You can freely reprint his weekly articles in your website, ezine, newsletter or ebook.

If you’re not a web designer, but have nevertheless experimented with HTML or popular editors like FrontPage to try to build a website, if you didn’t use cascading style sheets you probably came across most of the common problems that cascading style sheets were created to solve.

If you don’t use cascading style sheets:

• You will have to define the different web page attributes in each and every page you build, in order to preserve your site’s look and feel. This means that every time you create a new page, you will have to specify the background color, the font type and size, the color of your links, the type, size and color of your headings, the width and borders of your tables, etc.
• As a consequence of (1), the size of your pages will turn out to be many kilobytes more than if you didn’t have to repeatedly specify all those attributes in every page.
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With the increased affordability of web space and bandwidth, the growing use of high

 speed modems, and the abundance of implementation technologies like Flash, audio and video, comes the temptation to overuse them in web page design.

One important characteristic that has always differentiated good web designers from bad ones is the restrain in embracing every new technology that comes along. Good designers focus first on functionality (making sure that the web page achieves the objectives for which it was created) while bad designers rush to make gratuitous use of elements like graphics, flash animations and javascript, just “because they can” or because “it  looks cool”.

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Flash is a powerful web technology that achieves a high level of visual impact from the graphical point of view. Unfortunately, it is widely misused in web design. There are still many problems with Flash, especially related to usability and search engine behaviour; we need to thoroughly understand what those problems are before we decide to use Flash for our site.

As with any business decision, it all boils down to understanding what our target audience wants.

If you want to make a big impression from a graphical point of view, Flash is definitely a good approach. However, concrete evidence still points to the fact that most web users utilize the web to find information, and what they regard most important is:

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