Things a Blog Must Have
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So why did you create your Web site, anyway? Yes, you have a front page that may answer that question. More likely, though, it does not, and rather serves to let users login, “sells” your site, shows something splashy, and so on. Probably there is a way for users to navigate from the home page to the “about” page—go ahead and make that information available right from http://mysite.example.com/about.html. Someone will look there for it.
A good about page provides a quick overview of what your site does, maybe why you created it, why users might care, and probably has a few links to navigate back to the core functions of your site.
When users use your Web site, they will inevitably seek resources that do not exist. Probably this happens more often because of typos in URLs than for any other reason, but link rot, back-end misconfiguration and other causes contribute. When resources are unavailable, it is nice to provide some sort of fallback page that assists users in navigating to something more useful. A generic “not found” is enough for users to know a resource is unavailable, but it does not do anything to help them figure out “what next.”
CONTACT PAGE
So who are you? As with the about, users can probably get to this information after sufficiently many clicks away from your existing home page. Do not make users work too hard for this information: Put it at http://mysite.example.com/contact.html. While you are at it, use contacts.html for the same page, too. Throw in the .htm extensions while you are at it. Names are cheap. Of course, you can also leave the information at the end of those clicks in your whiz-bang navigation screens; a little redundancy in finding resources is not bad.
A lot of Web content is available through RSS. Doing that will not make sense for every Web site, but it will for many of them. It is perfectly reasonable to make RSS content be dependent on user-specific configuration options, or logging in, or paying for particular information. One size does not necessarily fit all with RSS.
If you do not want all the resources on your Web site to be indexed by automatic tools, say so in a robots.txt file. If you do want everything to be indexed, say that too. A Robots Exclusion Standard directive is not compulsory on users. All the major and legitimate Web crawling engines obey the requests in robots.txt.
Exactly how you will show a map of your overall Web site is not well standardized. Providing something along these lines is always useful, but exactly what level of detail is available depends on how dynamic your site is (and in what ways).
For many sites, a sitemap is simply a way of being friendly to robots such as search engines. Google has published a convention that piggybacks on the robots.txt convention. In brief, you can create an XML file that documents all the resources that your site provides. This acts as an “inclusion list” to complement the “exclusion list” of robots.txt.
eMAIL ADDRESS
Not everything happens on the Web. In fact, just in case the navigation tools on your Web site do not quite live up to your hopes (or maybe your users have a brain glitch in discerning your elegant design), it is nice to let users reach you by e-mail too.
By all means, prominently publicize contact information at contact.html and elsewhere on your Web site. But as a fallback, make sure mail sent to a few general e-mail addresses gets to the right person. These include at least, postmaster@mysite.example.com, webmaster@mysite.example.com, and security@mysite.example.com.
What do you think about it? do you have more suggestions?
Now that there is an awesome 404 Error Page Plugin you can offer your visitors a GREAT 404 Error Page without much effort.
Comment by AskApache — November 6, 2007 - כ"ה חשון תשס"ח @ 4:46 am