by Brian LaFrance on September 8, 2010
One of the most important parts of a successful website is how that site responds to requests. Everything may look good in your browser, but unless you know what response code those pages are sending back, it may not matter how good it looks. I have seen sites that show pages that look right on the surface but somehow the CMS they are using is responding with a 404, which is telling the visitor that the document wasn’t found. That’s a bad idea and a good way to lose all of your search traffic. I always check the status codes for a site I’m working on to make sure there aren’t unseen issues. One great tool for checking the response is URI Valet.
We have compiled a list of response codes that you should probably at least have a brief understanding of.
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by Brian LaFrance on September 2, 2010
For 10 of the last 12 years, I have had the privilege of working remotely and with teams that have many remote workers. The most important thing I’ve learned about having people spread out across the world is that successfully completing projects always hinges on how well you communicate with others on your team. It’s amazing how fast a good project can go bad if people don’t understand what’s going on. There are thousands of tools out there that are built to help people work together. In my experience, most of them suck.
So, how do you figure out which ones to use? You stop being a chicken, sign up for some free trials, and play with the tools. Don’t worry about wasting time or resources by trying something out and really putting it to use to see how it fits into your workflow. A few hours or days lost to finding the right tool for your needs will pay off dramatically in the long run. If you need a good place to start, I’ve put together a list of the top tools I use for collaboration and communication. It’s not a long list because there’s no reason you should need 20 different tools. That just leads to overload and having your system be too fragmented.
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Want the info on this page in a pretty little cheat sheet? Get your copy here.
