MyHealthAndBeauty.co.uk

I have just made my latest website live – My Health and Beauty – which helps consumers find health and beauty products at the best possible prices. 

Although it’s early days (Literally only made live last week) I’m happy to say I’m seeing quite an impressive number of visits to the site.

It’s quite a while since I built a website for myself, so it was nice to have no restrictions on styles or guide lines to adhere to.  As a developer/designer, to have a free reign when designing and developing websites makes you realise why you loved the profession in the first place.

The site is in its early stages and I intend to pile in more and more product feeds as well as informative articles on health and beauty to add extra value to the site.

The developments so far include a main feed from amazon, a community forum built using phpBB, a dynamic google xml sitemap and the integration of google analytics.  Aside from that I’ve gone through the usual SEO practices of ensuring page titles are well populated, meta tags defined and h1 tags contain keywords.
There’s so much more to do though… in fact, think I better get back to it.  But I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Developing websites normally consists of a few elements. Design your layout, code your pages, sort out your graphics, upload your files, test, debug, upload your files, test, debug, upload your files, test, de… ok you get the idea! What takes the time more than anything is the testing, especially when it comes to developing for all those browsers.

That’s why XAMPP is a god sent! Basically XAMPP sets up a web host on your local computer meaning you no longer have to keep uploading the files, but you just need to refresh your browser and view the changes. Trust me, this saves an enormous amount of time.
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twit!

A custom 404 error page can be invaluable in retaining traffic to your site which would have otherwise been your competitors.

In some cases it may be broken links on your site that cause a 404 error, but with so many link checking programs available (many for free) this can be easily remedied.

However, a good proportion of your traffic probably comes from search engines. If you are a well indexed site and you are redesigning your website you could be in for a nightmare situation, where many of your indexed pages become defunct.

If this is the case when a user attempts to load a page under your domain and recieves the default “Page Cannot be displayed” 404 error, it is highly unlikely they are going to attempt to access your home page by editing the url. What I can virtually guarantee, is that 99% of users will click the browsers back button and search again.

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