Mirror your site - Avoid Internal Link ErrorsWritten by Dianne Reuby
Unless your web site has only one page, with no graphics, you'll have internal links. That's links to other parts of your site, or to pictures that you've included on your page.To avoid basic errors such as linking to pictures or pages that are in another subdirectory, I find it best to set up a complete mirror of my web site on my PC. For example, on a large site I may plan to have each one of my web pages in a subdirectory, images for each page in an images directory within each subdirectory, and a *common images* subdirectory. So that's what I set up on my hard drive. I create a directory, giving it name of my site. That represents root directory on web server. Then I create my *common images* directory - this will hold images that are used by every page, for example banners, site logos, navigation buttons. Doing this saves space on your server, and makes your pages load more quickly.
| | 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.
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