Check your web site, Google Gmail

Riches Communications Newsletter

Issue 14, May 2004

In this issue:

- A quick web site check
- Google Gmail: coming soon

A quick check of your web site

If you own a business or work for a company, chances are that you have a web site. It's all too common to see a corporate web site with some fundamental problems that can be easily fixed by a web designer. A quick tune-up can get a tired or outdated web site back on track. Here's 5 simple things you can quickly check on your web site:

1. Make sure all the on-site and outward links work. Use Xenu to automatically find any links that are broken on large sites (sorry Mac users, I haven't found anything quite as nice as Xenu on the Mac). Broken links are an obvious sign of web site neglect.

2. Check the page titles. In most browsers the title of the page will be at the top of the application somewhere, or you can right-click the page and select 'View source' (look for the text between the <title> tags in the first few lines).

Titles should reflect the content of each page, and not say 'Welcome to XYZ Company'. Do a search on Google for 'Untitled page' - a real eye-opener!

3. Check the copyright date. The date should span from year of the site's creation to the current year if the content is still being updated e.g. © 2002-2004 Riches Communications Pty Ltd.

4. Check dynamic features such as search boxes, newsletter sign-ups, form submissions and drop-down or fly-out menus. Make sure they all work as expected (e.g. the search function actually returns some relevant results). Navigation menus often have repeated links in them due to 'copy and pastes' not being corrected during the design process.

5. Does the site have a custom 'Missing page' for 404 errors? Users may follow an incorrect link from a search engine or mistype a URL wrongly, and showing them the default server error is not very informative (see below).

Test your web site by entering a nonsense URL like http://yourdomain.com/fsfasfa.htm, and see what error you get. Have a look at the error page on our site or this collection of 404 pages.

In future issues we will look at more quick things you can check on your web site.

Google's Gmail: coming soon

Search engine giant Google is currently beta testing a new web-based email service known as Gmail. At this stage Gmail testing is restricted to a few thousand users, mostly industry journalists and major users of Google's Adsense and Adwords advertising programs.

Gmail has several features worth noting. Probably the most impressive is that the service will come with a 1000 megabyte mailbox, as opposed to the 2 megabyte limit from rival Hotmail (cause of the common "Mailbox full" error when emailing Hotmail users). This large space limit will be extremely useful for receiving digital camera images.

Another important feature of Gmail is the ability to archive and search previous email messages. It's expected that Google's search technology expertise will make this a key component of the email application. Email exchanges are also tracked as threaded 'conversations'.

Of course, nothing is truly free and the Gmail service will run small context-sensitive text ads inside the Gmail interface. These ads will be similar to Google's Adsense program (they appear in the menu on the right of this page). If you were viewing a series of email messages about a football game, the displayed ads might be for ticket booking services or merchandise web sites.

Some users are experiencing a Gmail server error when setting up new accounts. It may be a server load issue, with errors being generated when many people try to activate new Gmail accounts after a round of invitations are sent out by existing members.

If you haven't already received an invitation, it shouldn't be too long before you can set up your own Gmail account. Until then, take a sneak peek at Gmail.