Contingency DesignWritten by Richard Lowe
Several articles have appeared recently touting a concept known as contingency design. In a nutshell, this consists of providing assistance when your visitors do unexpected or blatantly wrong thing. This adds an extra level of professionalism to your site, which can lead to more return visitors (or in case of an e-commerce site, more sales).Some examples of contingency design are described below. Error pages: 404 error - This is one of most important contingencies to cover. It is wise to spend a lot of time on your 404 error page to ensure that it does an excellent job of helping your misguided visitors get back on track. This page should be a nice design which fits into your overall site theme. It's goal is to (a) tell your visitor what happened (or what may have happened) and provide some alternative ways to find out what they want. My own 404 page includes a site search engine, a link to site map, and normal navigation menu. Error pages: Others - There are about half a dozen error conditions (401, 402, 403, 404 and 500 come to mind) which can also happen occasionally. It is very wise to create individual error pages for each and every one of these. The other error codes can be especially confusing to some visitors so it's best to go out of your way to help them out. As a side note, Microsoft IIS web server allows you to define a lot more pages for far more specific error conditions than Apache. If you are running IIS, it's a great idea to define customized versions for all of these codes. Search failures - If you have an on-site search engine, be sure and spend some time on your search failure page. You want to help your visitors when they search but find no matches.
| | Table Tip: Border ControlWritten by Thomas Benton
Want a border for your table, but don't want to use standard border? Need a table cell outline? Here's how to do it.A SINGLE ROW, SINGLE COLUMN TABLE Insert a table with one row and one column. Make border equal zero. Set cellspacing to one. Set cellpadding to whatever you want it to be. Choose a background color for your table that will be border color you want to use. Then make cell color white or other color that you want. Here's an example: | Content goes here...< d> < r> < able> A SINGLE ROW, TWO CELL TABLE WITH BORDERED LEFT CELL Actually, to get effect we want, we'll embed a table in another table. First, create a 600 pixel table with one row and two columns. We'll make left column 140 pixels wide and right column 460 pixels. The left column will be used for a navigation panel. Set: border = 0, cellspacing = 0, cellpadding = 0, alignment = center. Set: left column width = 140, vertical align = top, horizontal align = center; right column width = 460, vertical align = top, horizontal align = center. Now embed a table in left column that is 140 pixels wide. Set: border = 0, cellpadding = 3, cellspacing = 1, width = 140. Make background color whatever color you want as an outline of left cell.
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