1. Stop at Five
Keep each level of directories to a maximum of five choices. If you find that you've got more than five links, start grouping items and making subdirectories.

2. Use No More Than Three
Every piece of information on your site should be only three clicks away. (Allow up to six clicks for Kevin Bacon.)

3. Keep It Under 30K
As a general rule, keep the download size of each page to 30K. If you have a page that will be a big download, warn your surfer with a note by the hyperlink. And avoid putting bigger graphics and applets on your home page, or surfers will grow impatient and veer off to another site.

4. Go Easy on the Color
Keep the number of colors in text images low. Each additional color increases the file size. Start with only a few colors and work your way up until you're satisfied.

5. Make It Polished
Use anti-aliasing to give your images the smoothest look and keep file sizes down.

6. Tone It Down
Avoid loud, tiled background images, which make reading your page extremely difficult. If you're really keen on using a specific design, reduce the contrast dramatically and increase the brightness.

7. Stay the Same
Piece an image together with many small ones. Multiple images load considerably faster than one large image map.

8. Keep It Quiet
If your page is under construction, don't tell anybody. The humor of an Under Construction road sign wears out quickly. If you're going to add something new, just add it without the bad joke.

9. Show Thumbnails
If you have catalogued images on your site, use thumbnail graphics instead of text descriptions. They load quickly and are more descriptive than words.

10. Use HEIGHT, WIDTH, and ALT tags on images to load your page.
When you use image tags, the page loads with all the text much faster.

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