Frame 609

So I started working on some revisions to a site design for one of our major brands that is going through an overhaul. They’ve contracted with a local ad agency to come up with the new creative and messaging. The agency took a couple cuts at the website that were quite laughable. It was very clear that whoever put the design together was coming from a print background, the work showed a clear lack of understanding for usability - even if they were given a the directive of “think outside the box”. The “feel” they put together was cool, just the execution as a site design was not practicle, usable or SEO friendly.

So a couple weeks ago myself and one of our other developers sat down with the marketing manager for this business unit and outlined what we’d do different to their design to make it “work”. The meeting was great, we had about 4 sheets of paper folded up and torn so the appropriate parts of each were visible. She got a copy of the working files from the ad agency, and tonight I sat down to actually put some of those changes into a real file

So I go in and open the files… not only are they set to be like 10.5×10.2 inches, but they are set to 150dpi. WTF? I realize that they were probably thinking they needed to have something to mount up for presentation, but man they knew it was for the website 72dpi printed would have been fine. Besides that, were they going to charge us when we told them we needed the files at 72dpi instead of their 150?

I can understand if their in house people don’t know what is good or bad from an SEO perspective, it’s still a mystery to many. And I can somewhat handle the design approach, but I can’t understand logo’s at the bottom of pages, page’s who’s height would have meant the logo would have been “below the fold” (although I think I’m past the myth of the fold), I can’t understand not having a navigation system designed that can handle the 70+ pages (w/up to 4 levels of nav) the current version of the site has, and I really can’t understand trying to put pop out navigation coming in horizontally from the sites of a page. Sheesh. Steve Krug would have had a conniption if he’d seen it (btw - I’ve never seen the work conniption spelled before now).

We’ve been on a hunt for a Web CMS for the past 3 or so months at work. Admittedly it hasn’t been nose to the ground that entire time, but I’ve been abit frustrated by some of what I’ve found. Here are my top 3 requirements.

1. I want it to support Web Standards, which in my mind means that it’s not going to add garbage code in to the templates we define for it, and it will support whichever client side DOM libraries we want to use - be it jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, or whatever.
2. It’s got to be able to support the SEO stuff we need to do - of which I do believe that the average content editor is still not going to be aware or have knowledge of all the things that will need to be done in that realm, as well as not knowing how much the WCMS would be able to “automagically” support some of the things (Google sitemaps, adding links to all the navigational structures that need them, etc etc).
3. We need to be able to plug-in or adapt it to our needs. We’d need to plug in custom code/scripts that hit other databases of info that we have.

I know there are already a ton of articles out there on this subject but my former boss (same company we’ve been moved around) has passed along an email with some links to check out from our new CIO (who’s trying to help support the mission as well).

I’m not sure how many of these I’ve already seen (I know I have seen some), but instead of just forwarding the email to myself at home, I figured I’d post them here so anyone can check them out, I’ll probably add to the list later.

1. http://www.packtpub.com/2007-open-source-cms-award-finalists
2. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/pirillo-starts-large-scale-community-cms-project/
3. http://www.modxcms.com/
4. http://www.alfresco.com/
5. http://www.silverstripe.com/
6. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/silverstripe_open_source_cms_google_summer_of_code.php
7. http://textpattern.com/
8. http://drupaltutorials.com/books/why-drupal
9. http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Lastnode/Wordpress_CMS
10. http://mambo-foundation.org/
11. http://www.idatatechnologies.com/SEO_Friendly-Content-Management-CMS.htm
12. http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
13. http://drupal.org/
14. http://www.joomla.org
15. http://www.hotbanana.com/
16. http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/164-WCM-Marketplace

When is a “404: File Not Found” not really a “404″?  If you’ve set up a custom 404 page in IIS, it very well might be… err not be.

I don’t think anyone is a stanger to having clicked a bum link somewhere, and ended up with ”Error 404: File Not Found” glaring at them.  The message seems pretty self explanatory, but unless you’ve done a little reading about how HTTP works, you aren’t going to know that the “404″ is a actually a message from your web server to the user’s browser (or whatever other user agent has requested the missing page)… it’s not just a code for an admin to reference when tracking down an error.

Setting up a custom 404 page is a pretty common task these days.  Web Developers and Web Designers want to display a page that looks like the rest of their site and that has a friendlier message for their users than the canned one the web server generates.  Those with SEO in mind are also likely to present a sitemap on the customized 404 page (also a good usability practice).  Some out there with more of a back-end/admin mentally might even set up some custom logging or email generation when a 404 page is served to let them know someone is trying to hit something that either is no longer there or never existed.

But my guess is that most developers that are using either Classic .ASP or even ASP.Net with IIS, think that making that simple change in pathing to their new prettied up/logging page (either in IIS directly for .ASP or in web.config for ASP.Net) is all they need to do to have set up the custom 404.  I remember back when I was first learning how to do it from sites like 4GuysfromRolla (when ASP was in it’s heyday), all you were really told to do after creating your nice looking HTML page, was to change the pathing to it in IIS… that was it. 

But it’s not.  Yes, making the change in the IIS properties will serve up your custom prettied-up page when someone requests a file that doesn’t exist, but there’s a problem…  Your server is still sending the browser or other user agent a “200 OK” status message.

Don’t believe me?  Grab the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, try and hit a bad URL on your site (assuming of course you’re running IIS) and look at the headers, by going to “Information->View Response Headers”.  You should see “200 OK” as the last line.   Well gee.. it served up that error page OK…   But the thing is, it didn’t serve up the page you requested.  What it should have sent the user agent was a 404 error, letting that agent know that the requested page doesn’t exist on the server.  This even happens in ASP.Net 2.0 when you use the built-in custom error page mechanism in Web.config… the page you define has to explicity send a 404 Status, otherwise IIS will just send a HTTP Status message of “200 OK”.

Why is it a problem?

Well, it’s really a matter of building things the way we’re supposed to be building them. It’s about following the standards set up by the W3C for how the web is supposed to work. We all know that the browser makers haven’t always supported the standards that were set in place by the W3C… and we all know how much complaining we did because of it. So this is one area where it’s up to us to try and adhere to the standard.  It makes for a better web.

There’s also an SEO benefit to this. When a Search Engine’s crawler comes by your site, the 404’s should tell it that it can drop whatever link it’s trying to index. Of course there are other types of redirects that might be more appropriate. But I’ll leave it to dedicated SEOs to give their reasons.

So what’s the solution?

You need to have your custom page explicitly change the HTTP headers to send a 404 status message.  There are a ton of articles around the web that talk about how to do this, but here’s a quick rundown.  You’ll use the Status property of Response object to do this in either environment (ASP or .Net).   And in .Net you’ll specify you’re custom error page in your web.config file.

Obviously you’ll need to make syntax alterations for your environment, but it’s basically identical between Classic ASP and ASP.Net:

Response.Status=”404 Not Found”   

Yup… that simple.  It just angers me that IIS doesn’t automatically send the 404 status when you set up your custom page.  It should at least give you some indication that it isn’t going to do so… or give you the option to automatically returned when you are setting the pathing for the custom page.   I can see some reasons why you might not want to have it sent all the time — for instance when running a campaign that provides “custom urls” to a list of recipients, you don’t really want to have to create a few thousand folders.  But really, when you are making the change in IIS, you aren’t really making the change unless you do it explicitly.  

 One last thing…

In the course of double checking my info, and finding the appropriate links for the post, I came across that in reality a 410 (Gone) status is what should be served.  I think I’ll have to do some more looking into that and see how many people actually use them.