Make sure in ADDITION to your background image, you also set a DEFAULT BACKGROUND COLOR. Many tymes I go to a site, and stare at blinding white background and pale blue text for 2 minutes till the black starfield background image loads. Had the DEFAULT BACKGROUND COLOR been set to black, I could have at least read the text.

Keeping along the lines of background images, if you use wild backgrounds, and I do, select a text color that will stand out. Navy blue text on a black background is hard to view. Keep in mind also, not everyone is looking at their browser with 24 Bit True Color. Monitor to monitor and browser to browser effects colors.

Always use height and width parameters in your image tags, no matter how small the image is. Example: the icon.gif above:
SRC="crleft.gif" WIDTH="46" HEIGHT="34">
That way, the browser, particularly Netscape, can display text before and during the loading of images.

Keep your image size as small as possible. If a large graphic is used, avoid placing it at the top of the page. Even if it is your Homepage name in shinning gold Black-Chance font. (More on .gif size reduction below.)

Consider this: What does your page look like if the graphics were not viewed? Some people opt to view webpages with graphics turned off. I recently visited a site purposely with my graphics off, and saw nothing but a blank page and an E-mail link in text at the bottom. If you have allot of graphics on a page, consider making an alternative page with most of the graphics removed.

Fill in the ALTERNATE TEXT for images. If a person does have their graphics turned off, text will still reflect what the image is that is not being viewed, in addition to a Hyperlink if so applied there.

<BLINK> </BLINK> is ANNOYING. Use it only when you absolutely have to. Italicize something instead to make your point,or use bold. Did you know a person with epilepsy is sensitive to blinking text?

Animated images are nice, but they slow down the page making it sluggish. Too many all blinking at once, effects the way they should really look like. Use less... for better performance.

Make use of tables. With a table, you may use images, forms, text... anything. They will automatically figure out exactly how tall and wide each cell has to be to accommodate what you've put in it. You can also justify text within the cells however you want. An excellent example is:
http://www.pics.com/~spyder/poetry.htm

Read the source and info of a page. There is a wealth of knowledge to be found within.

Keep your audience within your own pages, avoid sending them off into cyber space with mostly WWW links. Other links to the web are important, but chances are, they will be swept away by those cyber currents and never come back to your page. Especially the use of a search engine on your page. You finally have someone surfing YOUR page, why would you want to send them off looking for something else? Most people surfing know what YAHOO is, and where they can find it. YAHOO is a tool to get them into your site, not to send them away. If you insist on having search engines, at least put them on a separate page OFF of your Homepage.

Guestbooks should be placed at the bottom of your page. At the top of the page, I haven't seen anything to comment on.

Giving credit where it is due. If you use another's work, link back to them as per their request. Liking something and grabbing it is easy to do on this big Internet... but reputations are made quickly. Besides, chances are when you acknowledge another's work, they in turn will do the same for you, increasing hits on your page.

Keeping along the lines of using another's image. If you do use another's image, after receiving their permission, grab it and put it on your server. If you link from your page to their server for the image, it not only puts an additional burden on their server, it slows down the loading of your page. The browser is forced to go outside of your page to access the image. Worse yet.. what if that file has been removed. Now you have an ugly broken image icon.More information on the importance of NOT link to another persons server below.

Include an E-mail link address and a way back to your Homepage on ALL pages. Many tymes when going to a page from a YAHOO search to a page, I had no way to E-mail or jump to that persons Homepage. Lost in Cyber-space.

Under Construction warnings and signs are ridiculous. A webpage is always under construction and needs updating all the tyme. If you are unhappy with a page that needs work, remove it until it is correct.

A good way to reduce your gif. file sizes is with
Reductions up to 75%. Especially useful for word art where only a few colors are used in the graphic. From their site, files may be accessed either from your server, or directly from your hard drive. After reduction, regardless of where they were accessed from, you have to re-send them back to your server. It requires some effort to send them all one by one and re-send back to your server, but your page will load much faster thus reducing the possibility of the person viewing your page to get impatient and moving on. Many a great pages were never seen because they took so long to load. I know, I had one.

As stated above, you should avoid at all costs linking to another persons server for graphics. Here is a detailed page of why not.

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