Kathleen's Spider Web
~~Kathleen
Anderson, Spider
Web Woman Designs
How to avoid the infamous “The page cannot be found.”
The last thing you want your visitors and customers
to see is “The page you are looking for might have been removed, had
its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”
At best, you’ve lost their business for the moment, at worst;
you’ve lost their business forever. Here are a few tips on how to make
sure that doesn’t happen.
First, choose a good web host.
I’m not kidding. Ask around, check with your
peers, find out what hosts other people are using and ask questions. Do
they have 24/7 tech support by phone and by email? How responsive are
they? If your site goes down at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, will
there be someone there that’s knows how to bring your site back up?
Do a Google Search ( http://www.google.com
) with the keywords “web host reviews” and you will find plenty of
sites where web hosting companies are reviewed by their customers.
Once you’ve narrowed your choices down to a few
companies, send email to their tech support staff – you should
be able to find a tech support email address on their site – if not,
that’s not a good sign - move on to your next choice. How responsive
are they to your email? Do they answer pretty quickly? Do they answer
your questions completely and in a respectful tone?
That’s a real good sign. It means they want your business and
will value you as a customer.
Second, make your web site your browser’s Home page.
This way, every time you launch your browser, it
will connect to your site. You’ll know immediately if your site is up
or not. The down side to this is that your hits will be included in your
server stats, but you can just ignore the hits that come from your
domain.
Here’s how make your Home Page your Home Page:
- Internet
Explorer: Start IE, go to your web site, and then click Tools |
Internet Options | Home Page and click on “Use Current” and
Apply | OK.
- Netscape
Communicator 4.X: Start Netscape, go to your web site, and then
click Edit | Preferences | Home Page and click “Use Current
Page” and click OK.
Third, make sure that even when your site is up, that your
content can be found,
even if visitors are using old links that they’ve
bookmarked or copied wrong from someone else’s site.
Create your own customized “Not Found” page.
Make sure that you include your site navigation and a search feature on
the page, so your visitors will have a way to find what they’re
looking for. Click on this
link to see an example. Once you’ve created this page, contact
your web host, give them the location of the page in your web, and ask
them to make it your site’s “Not Found” page.
Author’s note: this is the
procedure I have always followed on my sites, which are all hosted
on Windows NT/2000 servers. I understand the process may be
different on Unix – you should contact your host and ask them.
Most webmasters reorganize and redesign their sites
from time to time – you want to make sure that your old links will
still work for a while. Don’t delete your old pages; just make a
couple minor changes to them.
-
First, delete most of the content and remove
the “description” and “keywords” Meta tags – you don’t
want the old page to continue to be indexed by search engines.
-
Then, add a note to the page to let your
visitors know the page has been moved, and give them the new link
(or a link back to your home page).
-
Lastly, add the “Refresh” Meta tag to the
Head of the page, like this:
<meta
http-equiv="refresh" content="6; URL=http://www.yourwebsite.com/newpage.htm">
The value given to 'content' is the
number of seconds before the refresh will take place; the value given to
'URL' is the page you want your visitor sent to. Most (but not all)
browsers will honor the refresh tag and take your visitors to the new page
in 6 seconds.
By using these tips, your visitors will
get a much friendlier message when they click an invalid link. In fact,
there are even web sites where you can get some examples of some very
friendly (and also some very funny) “Not Found” pages:
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