Consistency
Achieve consistency in your Web site design. Develop a common look and feel to your pages.
Navigation
Develop a simple and consistent navigation scheme that lets users get to their desired information as quickly as possible. Avoid excessive or redundant pages, but make it easy to get all the information provided in your site.
Focal Point
Draw your viewer to the most important parts of a page. Don't litter your page with too many animated GIFs. Instead, use them to highlight what's important on your page.
Palette
Stick to a color palette for browser compatibility (that is the Netscape 216-color palette). Remember that the more images you have, the more new colors you may introduce.
Fonts
Keep to one or two fonts.
Size Your Canvas
When creating art for your site, don't create pages that are too big for 640-by-480 screens. Remember that scroll bars and toolbars take up some of the screen width, so test your pages on small screens.
Reuse Images
Use the browser cache intelligently. You should reuse images on your site. Since graphics are cached, your browser doesn't have to make a separate request to load an image on more than one page. It's not just the size of the files that matters; it's also their quantity. It may take longer to load several 1K GIFs than to load two or three large, possibly preused GIFs.
Small Pages
Try to keep your pages to two or three screens each. It's annoying to have to scroll down several screens. Treat the top of your page like the top fold of a newspaper and put the most important material above the fold. Scrolling three full screens on a 640 x 480 screen is the equivalent of one printed page.
Branch Efficiently
Make sure none of your content is more than three clicks away from the home page. Pages essentially fall into three categories: destination (the content of your site), filer (the decisions to get to any content pages), and news (the updates that you want your visitors to see).
Color Simple
Do not use too many colors. Be smart about your colors.
The 50K Rule
Most visitors still surf at 28.8 Kbps, so think in terms of total download size at each step of your design process. Add the size of your HTMl file to all your images (and anything else you refer to) and you will get your total page size. You definitely want your total to be less than 50K.
GIF versus JPEG
Don't keep users waiting for bandwidth-hogging graphics. The default image formats for the Web, GIF and JPEG, create relatively small files, but you still have to choose between them, and they have relevant differences.
GIFs work better for line art and other graphics with limited colors and sharp edges. JPEGS work better for photographs with lots of colors and smooth gradients.
How Much Image Do You Need?
Although the file size of a GIF can be reduced by lowering the pixel depth, JPEG files are always full 24-bit RGB color. With JPEG, you can adjust the amount of compression. But the quality of a compressed JPEG is a blurry look.
Progressives.
Use progressive GIF and JPEG Images, which come into focus gradually as they are downloaded instead of popping up suddenly when downloaded completely.
Browser Differences
Both IE and Netscape support progressive GIFs, but only Netscape displays progressive JPEGs progressively.
Nice Break
Remember to Break and Clear All (br clear=all) after you've wrapped text around an image.
Sneak Preview
Always include the height and width attributes when using the image (img src) tag. The browser will then lay out the page before the images fully load. If you use the Alternate (alt=) attribute as well, you can enter text descriptions of your images so that your visitor knows what's coming before it gets displayed. Power surfers look for this attribute.
Pixel GIF trick
If you need tight control of clear space, fill that space with a clear image that is 1 by 1 pixel in size. Use the height and width tags to stretch the image to the size of the space. Since the image is only 1 by 1 pixel in size, it will download quickly. Download the transparent/clear gif HERE: by right clicking on the box and "Saving The Image". To see that it indeed is a little, tiny, clear gif just left click the box and see what happens :-).
The Internet is Electronic Commerce
The Internet is a way of doing business. Find the safe way.
The Internet Leads to Information
The Internet can bring the universe to your doorstep and your doorstep to the universe.
The Internet Can Actually Reduce Paperwork
The paperless office has long been an unrealized dream. The Internet partially achieves it.
Adherence to Standards
Mere adherence to technical standards, such as following TCP/IP and HTML standards, doesn't guarantee a successful web page. The internet operator often also has to wear a marketing hat.
Plan For Increased Traffic
The popularity of internet applications is quickly turning Webmasters into network managers. It's not just a matter of technology. There's a lot of planning and process issues, like managing the company's IP addresses and keeping enough bandwidth on each desktop so workers can use the internet without thinking about it. Upgrade your intranet network capacity before putting in popular Web-based applications or considering becoming a server.
Team Facilitatation and Training
Build a team of facilitators. Look for a content person, an engineer, a manager, a graphic artist, and a project manager. These are the basic skills you need in developing a web site.
The Rules Don't Change On The Internet
The same guidelines that exist for telephone and voice-mail and paper communication apply here, as well. There are levels of confidentiality and security you have to respect. You have to use the same judgement about whether information is tasteful or appropriate for the work.
Not Everything Belongs On The Internet
Everything and everyone in your business can be accessed using a browser today. This is powerful stuff. It's also dangerous. The most sacrosanct parts of your database must simply not be accessible via browsers. Where key data must be made available there are ways to protect it. Model the virtual world on your real world.
Intranet and Internet Security Is An Onion
In your Intranet Secure both data and applications. The second layer is encryption, point-to-point. Setting up a Web server properly can provide another layer of security. Firewall tunnel programs with accounts asking for user names and passwords can also be done from the server.
You Don't Need Many Servers For A Powerful Solution
A successful intranet doesn't have to have many servers.
Add-A-Tip *Do you have a tip you think belongs here? Let us know!
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by right clicking on the box and "Saving The Image". To see that it indeed is a little, tiny, clear gif just left click the box and see what happens :-).
