Some Dos and Don'ts on Web Design
borrowed from Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis's Web Pages that Suck

Summary:
Keep your page simple and clean
Keep your page targeted for a specific purpose and specific audience
Put content into your page

Clean
Purposeful
Content
 
 

• There's a lot of garbage out there on the Web. Don't add to the WWW landfill by posting preposterous and/or unsubstantiated claims. And be sure your BS detector is on high alert. 
• Plan ahead. Plot out all the subsidiary pages that will constitute your site. Sketch out a very rough "dummy" of what your page might look like. 
• Put the most important elments on the home page (entry page) and on each main subsidiary page. 
• Include significant content (not just pretty pictures, but real, detailed, well-written information). Fluff is fluff is fluff, whether it's on the tube, the radio, or the Web. Here's a great and unexpected example: the Jelly Belly site.Or, you can check out the excellent satirical writing at The Onion. 
• Don't use cheapo clip art, and don't use poor quality images. 
• NEVER use more than one animated GIF on any one page. And try to curb your appetite for animations. They take a long time to load and get really distracting. 
• Avoid using the BLINK option (it doesn't work for Internet Explorer anyway.) 
• Have a clear purpose in mind for your page. If you plan to convey information, make it easy to read and access. If you plan to sell stuff, make it easy to select and order. If you plan to build your ego and create followers, do so subtly and without making everyone sick at their stomach. 
• There are three types of navigational tools: buttons, text, and frames. Buttons are very useful, but should be used with constraint. Also don't overdo frames, although it is very handy to have a menu in a left-hand frame. Text links are one of the most reliable navigational tools, because they explicitly state where the link will take you. 
• Be consistent. If you use the same navigation tools on main subsidiary pages, your reader will be able to follow much easier, and the whole site will have greater integration. 
• Update your site often to offer new stuff to your readers. 
• A FAQ page (Frequently Asked Questions) is a good way to provide really relevant, pertinent information to your viewers. 
• Very important! Big graphics, images take a long time to load. If viewers have to wait, they will click the STOP or BACK buttons and be long gone. Use small GIFs for buttons, icons, and line art. But for larger high-quality images, use JPEG files. 
• Keep your pages short! A lot of scrolling discourages surfers. 
• Keep your text between 9 and 15 words per line. 
• Choose "browser-safe" colors--that is, colors that can be understood by both Netscape and IE. Using the RGB values (e.g., #FFFFFF is black) is much safer. 
• Make sure the HEIGH and WIDTH parameters are filled in when you use an IMG SRC tag. 
• Keep in mind the dimensions of a typical computer screen: it's 640 x 480 pixels (a pixel is a very dot of color, as you can guess from the numbers). When you figure in how much screen space a browser consumes, figure on a workable space of 535 x 295 pixels for your web pages. This is especially important if you think people will print your page. 
• Avoid black backgrounds 
• Don't mix text attributes, especially in a single line or in a paragraph 
• Limit the number of text colors 
• Italic doesn't show up too well on screen. Limit its use to titles. 
• Bold works best for emphasis, but don't bludgeon us with it! 
• The multicol and spacer tags are Netscape-only, so avoid them. 
• Center your graphics, but don't center your whole page. Boring! 
• Make sure your links show up against your background. 
• Avoid sound, music, and video files unless you've really GOT to have them--because they are so big and take so long to download. 
• Be careful of copyright violations! 
• Change your content pretty often. 
• Check your links very often.