Discontinued products / broken links
I have two questions here that I would really appreciate some info on.
First Question
On an e-commerce site, when a product becomes discontinued what is the best way to handle this to prevent broken links?
I run a few different e-commerce sites and about once a month different products become discontinued. I quickly remove them from the site and update my site map, but Google, and I guess other search engines, still crawl these pages and Google reports them as broken links in webmasters tools. What is the best way to handle this? I have tried several to help me out with this, including setting a redirect back to the main page on a 404 error. This worked rather well, but Google did not like it as it reported a status 200 and not a status 404. This was quickly removed. I have also tried to leave the pages, but removing all links to them. This also worked until customers who either followed a cached link or a bookmark, and placed an order. Going into the cart and putting out of stock or no longer available for every product can be overwhelming, so removing the pages is the easiest, but I am getting Google reporting broken links.
Question two
With the popularity of wide screen monitors what is the best resolution to design a web site around? I have seen sites that auto-size and look fine on a standard monitor but when viewed on a wide screen monitor look bad. Pictures become short and fat, text becomes spaced out, and white space becomes overbearing. What is the best size to create a site to so it displays properly on wide and standard monitors and also TV's? As of now I create with a fixed size of 1000px x 700px. What is the best size? The sites that looked bad when viewed from one monitor to the other had scrollbars disabled. I also noticed a major difference when viewed on a TV as some TV's try to stretch the size to fit the TV. This is mostly seen when viewed through a video out port to a TV.
|