HTML, Custom 404 Error

Use custom error page on your server (with Apache) is simply adding one line in your .htacess

e.g.
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

Read more:
http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/custom404.shtml

HTML, FieldSet

FieldSet and Legend combined can give you a nice box with title.

reference:
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_fieldset.asp

PHP, Compress Your Web Page to Speed Up

Compress your web page (on the server side) can save a lot of bandwidth.
Using gzip, the compression rate is usually over 50% !
You can test if your web page supports compression.
http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
Just add the following line on the top of your PHP page.
(remember enclosed it with the php tag)


if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();


Saving 5k (bytes) might not make your client feel the significant speedup, but it does cut down a lot of
your server traffic. Saving traffic is saving money.

If you can change your .htaccess, change it there for a server-wide improvement.
reference:
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/

HTML, Auto Detect Character Encoding

To teach web browsers auto detect character encoding, meta tag can be used.
e.g.

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

You can use more specific language encoding like Japanese, ASCII, etc...