- Keep in mind the purpose of your site: To provide current information about your organization in a tasteful maner.
- Site continuity. Keep it organized. Don't have "dead end" pages.
- Avoid poor navigation - people will get lost, especially with recursive linking.
- Avoid poor color combinations - Red and blue may be your favorite colors, but using one for a font and the other for a background is REAL hard to read.
- Colors that look good on your display may not on others (and vice-versa). Have you seen 20 TVs in a store all tuned to the same channel? Photos on your PC may look darker or brighter than other peoples PCs due to the brightness and contrast settings they use on their monitor.
- White letters in a dark background do look nice, but if you print the page, what do you get?
- Keep your background very simple, it's hard to read words on a busy background.
- Don't have different fonts on all your pages. It's better to stick to one theme throughout.
- Don't use high density photos, a JPEG of about 75K is quite sufficient for a good rendition.
- Don't have too many photos or too much graphics per page. If it takes too long to load, people will go elsewhere!
- Keep the layout simple, too much clutter creates mental congestion.
- Don't use pop-ups or pop-unders unless necessary. They are annoying to most people.
- Don't say "This site best viewed with [browser] or [display setting]". I wouldn't install a different browser or change my display settings for one website... would you? I like to build sites that work the similarly in FireFox and Internet Explorer.
- As of May 2009, Fire Fox® is used by about 48% of people, and Internet Explorer about 41%.
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