360aday.com

In an effort to maintain a focus on usability and guest experience, I’m in the process of doing up a new 404 page for a site I’m sort of working on. The code to slap in the .htaccess is pretty simple and straight forward.

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/custom_page.html

Once I get that done, it’s simple to make adjustments to the page. Now my task is to determine what makes a good 404 page. I’ve read in the past to integrate it with the site but I’ve also read the opposite. I also came across some extra inspiration from Smashing Magazine’s website. I don’t want to confuse the site guest thinking it’s actually a real page, or even worse, the page they were looking for. If I had a search for the site (which we don’t, but that’s another story) then I would definitely consider including that. Since I have PHP I can always try and see what exactly the user was looking for and make suggestions around that. And as a last resort I’ll be placing the call center number on there as well…just in case they need to actually talk to a person.

I’m curious though, what makes a good 404 page in your eyes?

With all the running I’ve been doing I’ve been trying to figure out roughly what my pace is. In theory it’s easy. Take the amount of time you’ve run, or walked, or biked, or ‘insert blank here’ and divide that into sixty to get miles or kilometers per hour. The issue of course is turning the seconds into a fraction. This too is easy, simply divide them by sixty, because there’s sixty seconds in a minute. My formula looks something like this:

pace = 60 / (minutes + (seconds / 60))

Initially I had made a little Excel document to do the calculation for me but figured I should be able to whip it up in JavaScript pretty quick and have included it here for your use. Let me know your thoughts.

Recently I had a client that we had come up with an amazing domain name to help promote his local Extreme Pita franchise. The goal was to attract more schools & businesses as regular catering clients. The domain, we thought was clever and simply was extremepitacatering.com – to the point, and key word rich.

Well unfortunately head office didn’t think so. Honestly, it’s not my fault they didn’t register it in the first place. Apparently the franchisee can utilize the Extreme Pita name in their domain, but not other terms. We’re still not clear on this, but honestly don’t want to hold up additional actions around it either. So since the location is in North East Calgary, the decision was to make it simple and still relevant so we opted for extremepitane.com – in fact it’s even shorter, so good for a Twitter world.

The issue came about though in trying to figure out the fastest, easiest way to get the domains redirected without having to copy over code and not losing any (though minimal) search results. A nice Google search for .htaccess forward domain generated a nice lead on a forum. I read through the results and came up with the following solution.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} extremepitacatering.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://extremepitane.com/$1 [R=301,L]

It was so quick and simple and nice to do. Something I’ve never had the experience of doing on a Windows machine. The pure power of Apache is definitely something I won’t sacrifice for clients. Utilizing the power of mod_rewrite is even better, but that’s for another post. BTW, if you’re hungry, go visit Dan at extremepitane.com and tell him we sent you.

This idea just popped in my head and I’m sure that something like this has been done before, but I want to see what can really be done, and have some learning in the process for myself and for readers. I’ve been watching, though not actively doing, the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog challenge and realized I had done a lot of the steps already. That said, I do have a page I think I could rank quite well for on this site. I’m talking first page results here people.

Task: Get the page at http://www.360aday.com/2009/04/13/calgary-radio-stations/ to rank for the search keywords of calgary radio stations and display first page results in Google. Now the task sounds like it may be a tall one, but I’m hoping it can happen with your help.

Solution: I’ve just started the #SEOChallenge on Twitter to help get the ball rolling (I hope) and am open to all sorts of suggestions to help me out. So to all you “SEO Experts” out there please leave a comment or Tweet me with some ideas and input. I’m confident with your help I can get this done.

There are many forks in the road as one travels through life. I for one am continually identifying them. There are also plenty of distractions along the way. New projects. New ideas. New clients. Old clients. The ever longing quest for money, freedom, time or whatever it is that drives the individual. For me, right now, I’m at a place where I need to take action.

As the saying goes “talk is cheap.” So is thought honestly. Without action, there’s really nothing. So for me now I need to take action and stay focused. That’s where the challenge comes in. In addition to holding a full-time, 40 hour a week job doing web design & development I also do my own gig outside that time and have a desire/need to be the best father I can be to an amazing baby girl. Toss in trying to be a respectable, decent partner and then add a dose of sleep! That really leaves me with very little time to work on the numerous ideas that are already in my head, let alone the ideas that seem to enter every day.

So what am I to do? It’s a matter of maximizing my time, efficiency and remaining focused. There’s being focused again. That’s where I’m at and know I need to take action so I can progress through the current fork in my road. I have a burning desire to break free from the current “9-5 boredom” while being underpaid and under-appreciated for the work I do. I’m confident that I have some multi-million dollar ideas in my head and those who I’ve shared them with see possibility as well. A few days ago on Twitter I slapped up a nice little tweet that really shows a little thinking outside the box. (If you’re trying to figure out the annual salary, just multiply it by 7).

That’s it, that’s all. At just a mere 10¢/second I can easily retire by the time I’m 32. A goal I’ve had for a few years. It’s so close I can taste it, but I need that focus. I need to focus on the four projects currently in progress…not to mention the others bouncing around. Heck, I even had one this morning while making breakfast. There’s no shortage of ideas.

I guess what I need to know is how do you remain focused? What techniques do you use to focus and how are you motivated to do “work for free” that ideally puts a LOT OF COIN in your pocket in the future? I need your help to keep me focused. You can seriously contribute to my success without financial expense or investment…just take a few minutes to leave a well, thought out comment. Please.