Eclipse Domain Services Library

As the web becomes increasingly more crowded, it is important for webmasters to take the extra step to make their web sites user friendly. There are a number of free resources available to webmasters:

What is a Favorite Icon – Favicon? Favorite icons, also known as favicon, appear in the URL bar. When a user bookmarks a specific Web page, that Web page loads a customized icon into the user’s browser, typically a tiny version of a company or Web site’s logo. Because the favicon is usually displayed next to the web site address, it can act like a small logo or an icon that visitors can use to remember the web site or the site address.

The favicon is displayed next to the Web site’s name in the Favorites list and can also be displayed in the Links toolbar. When a site has not created a favicon, IE will load the IE logo into the browser by default. When a user bookmarks a page, the browser will request a favicon.ico file from the directory of the Web page. If such a file exists, then the Web page is using a favicon and will return the file to the browser. Many browsers support favicons including all current versions of the major browsers support favicons, including Internet Explorer 5/6+, Firefox 1+, Mozilla 1+, Netscape 7+, Opera 7+, Konqueror 3+, Safari and more. If a particular browser doesn’t have support for the favicon feature, it’ll simply ignore the favicon and the presence of a favicon won’t affect that browser.

Webmasters can establish branding by customizing a favorite icon. The free service from HTMLKit http://www.html-kit.com/favicon

Custom 404 Pages. Urls are often mistyped into browsers. When a domain is correctly entered, but the web pages full url is entered incorrectly, it is possible to display a custom error page to web site visitors. By providing users a navigational bar or assistance rather than a generic error page. The customized error page will help keep prospective customers on your site providing them alternatives.

Webmasters should also routinely check their log files and correct any pages that result in errors. Most log analysis software will provide the referring document information for a webpage (the page that the user was at prior to the current page). Use the web log to track faulty links, if the links are out of the webmaster’s control (a 3rd part), consider setting up a re-direct and forwarding the traffic to the appropriate webpage.

Sample Custom 404s – http://www.web-search-engines.net/error-page or http://www.puzzle-place.net/error-page

Navigation Clear and intuitive navigation is important so that web surfers can locate the material of interest. Many web surfers will enter your website and land on a variety of pages. It is important that they navigate your site regardless of the webpage they landed on. Links on the site, should contain text that relates to the linked webpage’s content.

Consider recruiting a child or inexperienced adult to test your website’s navigation. Webmasters can often learn how others view their website, by just watching.

Webmaster Tools There are a number of freely available web tools that will evaluate a site for a variety of things. Most of the online tools will generate a report and highlight the positive aspects of the website and possibly the negative aspects of the website, as it relates to the evaluation.

Web Analyzer Tool – http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/web-page-analyser.shtml Search Engine Assessment Tools – http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Assessment/

Author: S. Housley

Technical Assistance by: Eclipse Domain Services

Plenty of Internet business owners begin with no money. They have to do everything by themself — the planning of a product, the development of a marketing strategy, the actual building of the site to serve their product’s marketing and advertising needs. When their business expands with time, they may find that their simple “homemade” website is probably not adequate to deal with everything, and so they will have to take a week or so away to just allocate that to the website development.

Sound familiar? Odds are, that you’re an individual who started everything without money as well, thus you’re quite skeptical when it comes to giving away your hard earned dollars in return for something that you could have made yourself. Even so, there is a lot more to getting a website designer than simply polishing off a job that you don’t want to do.

If you use a web site designer to do your project for you, you are doing more than just giving over the “dirty task” to another. In reality, by paying a little cash, you can let the web designer worry about the tiny irritations that constantly evade the main picture and only come up when you’re nearly through the job. That way, you’ll be focused and have more hours to invest in your actual business strategy.

Meanwhile, provided the designers you employ are professionals, they’ll be good at what they do. Consequently, through outsourcing your web site design functions to them, you will not need to fret when problems appear because you can easily always get them to fix it on your behalf. Once more, they should be able to pin point the problem and repair it more quickly than you probably are able to.

Finally, the project you pay for will end up a lot more professional than what you can accomplish since the web designers have been doing it a bit longer than you have. After all, they do it as a living so they need to be good!

And so, remember to not only to work your business, but grow it on top of that – by Outsourcing.

When you use web design Australia professionals, you are going to find it is much easier to gain the visibility that you want to get the edge on your competition. With a professional business web design, you are going to be able to connect with your customers like never before!

Author: Norman Stone

Technical Assistance Provided by: Eclipse Domain Services