I’ve mentioned “error pages” before, but I’ll revisit the subject regularly until everyone’s sorted theirs out. Do you know what happens if someone types in a page on your site which doesn’t exist? Here’s what happens on our site. Is your “error page” as user-friendly? Try typing a load of nonsense after your domain name and see what happens.

Even if you think what you’re providing is OK, it may still be worth reading 404 error pages, news sites and user experience on the E-consultancy blog, where they investigate what happens on some of the big news sites (such as the BBC or FT) to see if there’s anything we can learn. One thing to remember when designing your error page (also known as the “404 page”) is that visitors might have followed a broken link from another site, and therefore it’s not their fault they’re seeing your error page - so don’t imply they’re idiots who can’t type.

An excellent article has just appeared on the E-consultancy blog about content for your B2B website. In Creating Cracking Corporate Content author Kevin Gibbons reminds us that the days of writing stilted web pages full of key search terms have long gone, and nowadays there’s little difference between copy which “works” for human visitors and that which “works” for search engines. The content requirements for technology guides, press releases, product descriptions and blogs are all discussed. Well worth digesting.

Most of you won’t be redesigning your company website any time soon, and even then, if you’re part of a large corporation, you may get little or no input to the exercise. But it’s worth understanding the fundamentals of on-screen design, and an easy-to-understand article called What is the best screen resolution to use for your website? on the E-consultancy blog is a well-written guide if you want to understand one of the most basic decisions behind how a website looks.

I’m writing this on an iMac with a huge 1,920-pixel-wide screen. You may be reading it on anything from an old 800-pixel-wide monitor (less than half the size) to something as big (or bigger) than mine. Chances are, you’re somewhere in the middle. But whatever the case, never assume that what your visitors see is the same as you do, because it isn’t. And I haven’t even mentioned mobile devices. Your site needs to be able to cope with everything. Can it?

Increasingly, experts are suggesting that you focus on getting your website visitors to do the one thing you want them to do, rather than impress them with the breadth of options you offer. Having built up a successful online publishing venture myself on precisely this principle, I find that most gratifying. Analysts amongst you will be interested in a recent study which compared the ability to “find a camera which you like” on the Argos, Comet, eBuyer and Currys websites, discussed in Argos beats competition with user-friendly web design on the E-consultancy blog. Click through to the PDF report in the article, and have a read. It’s fascinating stuff.