I’ve been working on my 404 error page - you know, the page you get when you click a broken link or type an address in wrong. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

photo credit: Gaetan Lee

So what does that have to do with space men and gorillas? Take a look and see. Let me know what you think.

Visit Area 404

Want to know more about how to create a 404 error page in WordPress?

See Are You Losing Readers From Your 404 Page?

Here’s a great ready-made To Do List of quick improvements you can make to your website. Definitely one to bookmark. I know I’ll be working through them. I may not agree with 100% of them, but most look pretty spot-on.

Here are a few items from the list:

• Keep background colors and images at a minimum. Backgrounds are often less than visually appealing and can make your site load slowly.
• Reduce choices. Avoid overwhelming your visitor with lots of different options.
• Stay consistent. Check to make sure that colors and design are in the same general scheme so that visitors know they’re still on your site.
• Validate design in alternative browsers. See how your design renders in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox to make sure that it looks right no matter who is viewing it.

101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website

photo credit: booleansplit

Here’s a 27 second video by the creator of Web Pages That Suck. Whose big idea was it to create trailing cursors? Guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. It just screams ‘AMATEUR!’ If you have a trailing cursor on your site, banish it to the realms of darkness where it belongs today. Please.

If you’re one of those people who swear black and blue that the way a site looks doesn’t matter if the content is good, I DARE you to visit the site I’m about to link to. Will you survive long enough to actually read any of the content? I didn’t. I’m waiting for the ambulance to take me to the emergency room to fix my bleeding eyes. This site proves once and for all that if Content is king, Design rules the universe. Click only if you don’t have a weak heart (or stomach):- HavenWorks.com

If you’re using the latest version of WordPress to power your website (and you probably should if you aren’t), this post explains how to edit your theme so that the Title tag is displayed better. (Your title is displayed at the top of your browser when viewing a page and shows up in search engine results as the title of your page.) For some reason the default title tag here was something like:- Web Design Watchdog » Blog Archive » Post Title. I’ve changed it to:- Post Title | Web Design Watchdog. WordPress Tip: Reorder your Title Tag