1. There are hundreds of available fonts from standard size Times New Roman to extra large and bold Goudy Stout. Using more than two, possibly three, fonts are not recommended. It’s fun experimenting with right font for your page, but unless you’re creating a web site where you’re featuring fonts, keep it simple. Also, script fonts look awful when they’re done in all capital letters.

2. With advent of animated graphics [GIF’s], most of them available for rock bottom price of nothing, people can go crazy decorating their site with visual equivalent of Disney World. Some of animations do more than move; they make noise! Remember, folks, less is more! One or two appropriate animations per page can enhance it. Yes, animation is fun. But too much can be distracting.

3. Spell check your page. Read it. Then read it again. Even if you have a graphics’ intensive site, you will have some text. When that text is misspelled and/or full of grammatical errors, you’ll turn away a proportionate amount of traffic. I once discovered a site with TWELVE misspellings on one page! No matter what you’re selling or showing on WWW, being able to do so in proper English [or whatever your language] is always appreciated. Most word processing programs include a spell check. And if you’re in doubt, have someone who likes to read and write proofread it.

HTTP 404 - File not found is a browser error message that we've all grown to know and hate. On a number of search engines, it gets to a stage where we feel that all their links will return this result? How is this happening, who is to blame and how do we fix it?

On reviewing my server logs, I had noticed around 1% of all requests from my site will return this HTTP error code. One of reasons for it was a stupid mistake I made around 6 months ago. I wasn't happy with naming of a couple of my files, so I renamed them without considering consequences:

- The files had been on my site for a few days

- During that time a couple of search engine bots had crawled through pages. A search engine bot is a software program that scours web sites for content and returns results to a search engine database. The search engine interface feeds off this to return links and descriptions to surfers when they have entered their search criteria

- Since I changed names of files after bot went through, pages in their original state no longer "existed".

- The search engine query results reflect database entries, pointing to wrong filename, visitor clicks on result - 404.... aaaaaaaaargh!

It would appear that some search engines only update their results once or twice a year, such is hugeness of task of spidering web these days. Last month, percentage of requests to my site that resulted in this HTTP error code was 2%, previous month to that - slightly higher. While I am happy that this is reducing, I am kicking myself that I didn't think things through six months ago - we live and we learn. 404 errors may also be caused through a malformed browser request (user error - wrong URL typed into address bar)

Save yourself shame and embarassment (and homicidal thoughts directed at you from frustrated potential visitors) - plan your site carefully before you promote to search engines.

If you do or have found yourself in same situation as me, there is something that you can do about it (dependant upon your hosting service set up). Instead of a visitor being directed to those rather horrible "file not found" pages, you can create custom error pages. Here is an example:

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/aaaargh The above link is incomplete which triggers a 404 response on my server.