Page Descriptions
User Experience
Each webpage should include text summarising its context. The text is included in the HTML attribute <meta name="description" content=”…”> determines what is displayed as the page description. For example:
Page descriptions appear below the clickable links in search engine results, thus contributing to a website visitor’s understanding of the site’s content.
Each page’s description should be unique. SEO research advises limiting descriptions to less than 300 characters to avoid truncation in search engine results.
In effect, page description text can be seen as a form of advertising copy: a concise pitch for why a particular page has value.
Social Media Networks
Server Status Codes
In response to requests from browsers, servers provide http status codes that can be grouped as follows:
- 1xx – Informational statuses
- 2xx – Successful connections
- 200 – The request was successful
- 3xx – Redirected connections
- 301 – The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URL
- 304 – The requested resource has been temporarily assigned a different URL
- 4xx – Client connection errors
- 401 – The request requires user authentication
- 404 – The server has not found a matching URL: broken link
- 5xx – Server connection errors
- 500 – The server could not fulfil this request: an internal server error
More details on each set of status codes is available from the ietf.org.
Server Compression
User Experience
A simple, but technical, approach to improving page loading speed is to turn on server-side compression. This is usually referred to as GZIP or Deflate compression.
GZIP or Deflate compression are standard web server features and offer a material impact on the speed with which web page elements are served out to browsers.
All modern browsers are capable of handling servers using compression.
For more information about the impact of using server compression on higher education websites read: 3 Ways to Make Higher Education Web Pages Load Faster
HTTP Version
In response to requests from browsers, servers provide http status codes that can be grouped as follows:
1xx – Informational statuses
2xx – Successful connections
3xx – Redirected connections
4xx – Client connection errors
5xx – Server connection errors
More details on each set of status codes is available from the ietf.org.