There are, as few people would disagree, a hell of a lot of really shit Web pages out there. A lot has been written on it, too, so I don't intend to go into huge detail about some of the more obvious sins like images that take hours to download, dead links, spurious scripts, friendly flashing messages urging you to download the latest version of something or other before you can even read these pages, and, gods protect us, frames. Go to the links at the bottom of the page for much better rants on these subjects than I can be bothered to produce, but meanwhile...

1. Think about what you're going to say before you actually say it.
   You'd think it would be obvious, but no. How many pages have you seen which merely say "Hello, I'm alive, last time I looked, and this is a fuzzy photo of me and my cat"? I wouldn't mind so much if they were short, but such pages do tend to go on at length without having a discernible point. And then they link to all their friends' pages which do exactly the same thing.
2. Don't leave corpses lying around.
   Many of these pointless pages, of course, are years out of date and the account once used to access them is dead or moribund. Hint: you may have moved on and got a high flying job in corporate hell, but if you ever did a Web page just because you could, when you were at college or in that dull job or wherever, check to see if it's still there. You don't want people searching for you and finding that terrible photo or reading about your appalling taste in heavy metal, do you?
3. Have some links.
   The Web is meant to be, well, a web. An intricately interlocking thing that leads in fascinating and unexpected places. It's not a suburb where everyone can hide behind their own little picket fence (whatever Geocities might say). If you don't link, you won't get linked to - and your page will end up very lonely indeed. This goes for businesses too. If you create a dead end you won't stop people accessing your competitor's pages, but you will make yourselves look like a dead end.
4. Distinguish between internal and external links
   While you can't keep people in your site, you don't want them wandering off by accident. And neither do they. I have often been annoyed when clicking on a link in the middle of someone's quite interesting text to find my browser grinding away trying to fetch the complete original documentation of something or other from a site in Outer Lemuria. So put your external links in separate references lists, such as the one at the bottom of this page, and don't overwrite the useful information about where they are that appears at the bottom of your browser with witty Javascripts like this.
5. Have something other than links
   Why should we care about your bookmarks file unless we know something about you?
6. Look Gift Horses in the Mouth
   Web rings, awards, free counters, free maps, free visitors' books, links to pages that will tell you when your page is updated, even logos from your free Web page provider, are all ways of giving someone else free advertising. Which goes to show that just 'cos something is free doesn't make it worth having. You may decide you need some of these things, but think about what's in it for you. I've seen pages that are members of so many Web rings that they need a separate page to put all the obligatory links on, and still their free counter is reading somewhere in the low hundreds.
7. Don't Use Geocities
   Honestly. I've got so I won't visit Geocities pages because of the advertising. The odd banner is one thing - I only have to switch images off to avoid that - but starting up new windows just to put ads in is, in my really quite pissed off opinion, extremely rude.
8. Have an Index
   We may not all want to go through your pages like mice being gently prodded through a maze by electric shocks. We may even be there for a reason, but if you don't tell us what's on the pages we may just leave without finding it. For a simpler set of pages a comprehensive index page should do, but I have come to the conclusion that for larger sets of pages with complex structure a site map that lists every page on your site, in text, is both courteous and more likely to make sure people stay. For an example, mine is here.
9. Be any browser friendly
   This covers a lot of ground. It means not being dependent on images, especially when text will do. Use ALT tags so that people who don't download images know whether to bother, as well as for text only browsers, don't make people download plugins before they can see anything, and do check your pages with more than one browser before releasing them. One difference not everyone is aware of is that not all platforms use the same colour palate. This means that blocks of colour which look beautiful on one machine will have to be approximated on another. If you want to avoid this, have a look at my browser friendly colour table.

Other Web page advice:

• The Any Browser Campaign
• Web pages that suck

Last updated 2nd March 2000