by WebKeyDesign | Jun 2, 2005 | WebKeyDesign
There’s a new search tool I added to the site over the weekend. You can find it under the Tools section on the sidebar as: Links Tracker.
The way it works is you input you domain name, along with some other parameters and it will track via Yahoo, all the web sites that have a link back to the site you typed in. This is really handy for seeing just how many people link to your blog, your site, or any page you have.
A Bandwidth Tester is also setup, so in case you were wondering how fast is your connection to our site, this tool will help you visually gauge it. The test works really well once, but if you run it multiple times, you end up throwing off the results due to cache mechanisms.
by WebKeyDesign | Jun 1, 2005 | Internet Tools
The big searching companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are working hard on developing new searching technologies that finally may solve some of the problems we all have with current internet searches. Yahoo’s Mindset is perhaps a good peak on the future of search and just how useful it may become when search results are no longer laden with an overabundance of advertisements and special offers.
Mindset works just like a regular Yahoo or Google search, but on the results page, you can move a slider to either Shopping or to Research, this way your results become filtered depending on where you move the slider bar to.
I tried a generic search for “Toshiba tv review” and when moving the slider to Research, the first link was in fact an actual review of a Toshiba product, and not an add or store listing for one.
It will be interesting just how well Yahoo’s Intent-based searching develops and how Google will implement their own version of it in the future.
by WebKeyDesign | May 27, 2005 | cPanel
In cPanel, the Error Pages function allows you to modify the different html pages that a user will see when an error is registered on your site. The most common being the famous 404 Page Not Found error that you get when a page does not exist. This tutorial will show you how to setup a proper 404 Error page, so that visitors to your site will hopefully find what they are looking for.
cPanel lets you save the custom 404 Error page as anything you want, but the default name for it is 404.shtml. It is best to go ahead and code an html file and then upload it to your public_html folder as 404.shtml. You can then view and edit this file by going to cPanel: Error Pages.
As to what to include in your 404 Page, you can use our own WebKeyDesign 404 Page as an example. The basic things to include would be:
1. Your site logo, with a link to your home page.
2. An explanation for the error, like “Sorry the page so and so cannot be found on our site”. If you insert the code <!–#echo var=”REQUEST_URI” –> into your html, this will display the url that the browser requested. On our 404 page, we include the code <!–#echo var=”HTTP_REFERER” –> so that the person knows who referred them to the incorrect page.
cPanel offers the following variables in Error Pages:
- Referring URL: Displays the URL that referred a user to the page.
- Visitor’s IP Address: Displays the users IP address.
- Requested URL: Displays the URL requested by the user.
- Server Name: Returns the servers name or websites URL.
- Visitor’s Browser: Displays information about the user’s browser.
- Redirect Status Code: Displays the error code associated with the error.
3. A Default Page to your site is very helpful, for visitors to learn more about your site. Usually the default page should be a site map, an about page, or at least your home page.
4. Contact Information is essential. Some visitors will want to contact you, so include your contact page or email address for your site. The webmaster@mydomain.com is probably best to use if you are going to put an email address.
Other ideas for your 404 page:
The search box is a good idea. On our default page, we setup a form that simply searches our site through Google, but you could get more complicated, by including your own site’s search box and code. To implement a simple search box include the following form code:
<form action="http://www.google.com/search" name="searchbox"
method="get" style="margin-left: 2em;" />
<input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="Yoursite.com" />
<input maxlength="256" size="40" name="q" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" name="btnG"
style="font-size:75%;" />
</form>
You will need to change the Yoursite.com to whatever your actual domain is of course.
Another good idea is a navigation bar for all of your site’s main pages.
One last thing to consider is that Internet Explorer will nto display any 404 Error page that is less than 512 bytes, which means your error page needs to be at least around 12 lines of code.
For more information visit some of these sites:
