Web Guidelines
2. Do not use a ‘heavy’ background that distracts from what you are trying to present and makes the text hard to read. Remember what you are trying to do with your site, and I think for most, it is not trying to impress people with some tacky background tile. Keep it easy to read; there is a reason why solid colored text on a solid colored backgrounds are used often.
3. Use sharp clear pictures. This is really important, a good looking page can be made with just one clear sharp image and at the same time, the best looking page can be made to look bad with just one crappy image.
4. Get sharp clear copy of your logo. If you are a company, you want to look professional so that people have confidence in giving you their money, a crappy looking logo isn’t going to do it.
5. Avoid the IE page transitions. IE (Internet Explorer) can create many special effects, things like page transitions (page wipes etc …) are tempting and may be suitable sometimes, but for 99% of web sites they are not.
6. Avoid the flying text and blinking images. Check out point number 5.
7. If you are trying to sell something, having live credit card processing will increase your sales substantially. PayPal is pretty good for that.
Above all, make the website pages no more than 60-70k (I shoot for 50k) if you can, and keep things very simple so your clients have an easy time finding things. You can help this along by strategically making use of the browsers caching capabilities. In a nutshell; web-browsers will reuse images that it has loaded. So (if for example) if you have an image on your 1st page that you also use on 2 other pages in your website, this image only gets downloaded once by the browser and subsequent times the browser will automatically load a copy of the image it has from its’ own cache. This can really speed up things from the surfers point of view and also saves you bandwidth.