A Custom 404 Page

If you have own domain name, you can generate a custom 404 error page for your visitors. What does this do for you? It can help you keep visitors who may leave if they get the standard "File not found" page. Such a page looks a little like this:

File Not Found
The requested url /notafile.htm was not found on this server.

That isn't very interesting to a visitor, and if the person came from another site's link- that possible visitor may just leave. However, you can make your 404 page much more informative, and give your visitors with a way to navigate through your site. Instead of a "File Not Found" and not much else, you can drive them an error page with a professional appearance.


To begin, go to the main directory of your web site where your main page is situated through FTP or Telnet. Look for a file there named .htaccess, it begins with the dot as although it is a long file extension. If you have the file, you will want to correct it. If you do not have the file, generate a new text file and save it as ".htaccess".

If you are creating the file from scrape, simply type the following line into the file, changing the url to the position of your custom page:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/custom_page.html

What gives a site a professional appearance?

The site should contain the content part should be interesting which is presented in manner of quick down load time. The sites overall should remain the same from page to page.

The site should load fast with an obvious navigation system, continuous graphics and links that work.

The site should use suitable graphics. Don't put in too many, and make sure to optimize the ones you do use to recover load times.

The site should have content that changes regularly, cheering return visitors.

The site should have easily available contact information and you should give a rapid response when people demand information or report trouble.

The site should recommend lots of free things and members-only specials.

The HTML should be clean to the site. The website should be cross browser friendly and accessible to those using text only browsers.

Color Shorthand

Once you've started using CSS layouts for your Web designs, you may observe something odd about the way the colors are distinct. Rather than the standard 6-character long code following the pound sign (#cc99ff), instead you see just three characters (#c9f). This is called color shorthand and it takes benefit of the fact that the browser-safe Web palette uses triplets that are always doubled. In other words, each color triplet is made of 3 pairs of characters 0-f (base 16), and with browser-safe colors they are doubled. So, to write color shorthand, you simply take away the duplicate character.

White is written #fff in shorthand
Black is written #000
Red is #f00
Green is #0f0
Blue is #00f
and so on...

Do Your Pages Download Fast?

A number of people have said my pages are downloading fast. Some have given numbers. But what do they mean? The pages should download in 4 seconds. A specialist site designer reported my pages downloaded within 10-15 seconds. A advertising guru gave times from 8 to 10 seconds.

The only way to get good data is to delete your cache files. Your browser will not take the time to download anything which is already on your disk, even if you click Reload. Find your cache directory and delete all files in it. Now download your home page and note down the time.

If your download speed is greater than those of equivalent sites, take a solid look at your host. A server makes money by selling more ability than it has. Then your visitors will always find things moving too unhurriedly.

The Science of Web Design and Website Usability

Many people get into Web design and development because they are interest in secret want to be designers. Think about it, when you first establish the TextArt in Word, you fell in love. Every one of your documents had to have some conjured coding and pretty text or images, yet if it was just the color of the text.

HTML and Web Development gives people who would usually be programmers working with code a possibility to be more visually creative, and this is fun.

But there can be a science behind Web design. Your option of font and the width of your page shouldn't just be based on "what you like". Follow these simple steps to be more scientific in your Web design:

Usability Testing

Browser testing

Learn from Desktop Publishing and Established Design Principles

Use your log files

The Back Button - How People Use Web Sites

The Back Button is one of the most important Web buttons on some Web page, and yet most Web designers don't think of it to use when they're building their pages. In fact, it's very common to see "back to home" or "back to start" links built into the pages while they design. But unless these links have built in logic that knows precisely where the customer was before they clicked.

How Most People Browse the Web

Most people come to a Web page and surf. If it doesn't look like what they needed to study or wanted to read about, they leave. And the quickest way out of any Web site is, you guessed it, it’s definitely the Back Button.

They sit at a Web site with their mouse hovering over the scroll-bar area, just in case they need to scroll the page. Then, unless impressive really interesting comes along, they pull their mouse up to the upper left side of the browser and go back to their previous place.

Take Advantage of the Back Button


1.Place your branding up near the back button
2.Make items in that area clickable
3.Use server logs to find out where they came from

Designing Your Website for Browser and Platform Compatibility

In the early days of the Internet, we used to come across many sites advertising "Best viewed with Netscape" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" or some thing like that. Now a day, such labels seem to be rarer. Webmasters today put an excessive amount of effort to promote their sites on the search engines and elsewhere, and it's unlikely that they'll want to turn away any visitor just because he or she uses a dissimilar browser.

Along with this code of catering to the widest likely audience is the principle of designing your page for compatibility with different browsers, operating systems and hardware.

In this article, we will discuss four compatibility issues. They are by no means exhaustive, but they are at least starting points to designing a site that will be viewable by more visitors. Some of the points are below.

1. Screen Resolution Issues
2. Colour Limitations
3. Frames
4. JavaScript Availability