Site Building Tips
What makes a site good
Content is king
Good websites have several things in common. First and foremost is content. Content is king. Designers talk about 'stickiness' to indicate that a site attracts repeat visitors. There are classes and books that tell site designers to include things that are fun and visually appealing, but every site that has regular repeat visitors has them because it offers things that they want to spend time on. Such things are content.
It must first work
Good sites work well for most visitors. This means that your site should not incorporate things that only work for visitors on a specific platform. Excluding visitors without Flash or without VBScript or by their browser identification is wrong, wrong, wrong! Some users, particularly those who are most likely to be good visitors, will deliberately disable some of these types of content. It is best to not rely on these technologies whenever possible. When you absolutely must rely on them, you should include alternate code that will inform users without it about their lack
Speed matters
Many people still use dial-up to access the Internet. When these visitors visit your web page, if it takes longer than 30 seconds to load, you will have a dissatisfied visitor. If at all possible, you should design your website to provide the content first and the more time consuming elements second. It is possible to design very good pages with very little download time, but it does take some effort.
How to make the site work
First, foremost, do not rely on anything but standard html for essential functions. Whenever possible, include notes indicating what is needed if it is not present. You can warn non-javascript users for example that they need javascript, put in alt tags for flash and even check for cookies if care is taken.
Try to put all the most popular content within three clicks of the main page.
Include descriptive references for all links, and avoid the "click here" link.
Use redirects to replace pages that are moved or removed from the site. A meta-refresh redirect is simple, 30x redirects are better. It is relatively easy to use a PHP redirect to combine the two and presents a better experience than 404 errors.
Do NOT rely on the display as you see it in your browser. At the very least load it in at least Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is essential that you have a website that will work with most browsers unless you are providing the browser to all the visitors.
Images are to present pictures, not text. Do not try to present text inside of images except in the case of very small buttons which should have a descriptive tag.
Do NOT use fonts that visitors might not have. Many sites that are created by novice web developers fall into the trap of using fonts that are only available on Windows, or worse yet, on their own computer! You should view your site with 'seriv' and 'san-serif' alone if possible, then with the fonts that are widely available or at least in the core fonts list.
Try the page at various displays to ensure that it handles resizing gracefully. Pages that are sized for only one display are invariably poorly displayed to many people. Ideally your page should work for any display size, but at the very least for widths from 800 pixels to 1280 and for heights from 600 to infinity.
Avoid putting primary content in PDF and do not use Word documents if at all possible. PDF is a very good format for storing documents on disk, but it is not a substitute for HTML content. PDFs can be converted to PNG files if you want to present the information online. At the very least, if you must provide documents in PDF, provide a description of the document so that the visitor does not waste time downloading a document to see what it contains. It should also be noted, PDF is not a read only format unless you are using document signing techniques.
Check your HTML for validity. There is a free html validity check at http://validator.w3.org and a variety of free tools as well. Firefox has an add-on called HTML Validator which is very handy and most design tools have built in validators.
How to build an attractive site
Use CSS! CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are the way that your web documents should be formatted to appear as desired. They come in a wide variety of complexity, but good design will use one or two external stylesheets for for the entire site. It will allow the visitor to download the sheet once and save bandwidth for both your hosting and also for the visitor. It will also make it easy for you to change portions of the site's look and feel as you need to.
Be careful of colors. Colorblind people should be able to navigate your site and people with a sense of taste should be able to stand to look at it.
Avoid FrontPage as it is notorious for including code that will not work in anything but a few versions of Internet Explorer and FrontPage is no longer supported by Microsoft. As an alternative, consider Nvu if you need an easy way to build pages.
More is not better! Every page should have a purpose. Do not try to put everything into your page, it is best if all the content of most pages can be seen on a single screen.
Those pictures are only amusing to you. If you have funny images or movies, do not put them on the front page and if possible, break them up into separate categories or even pages. If your site is image intensive, use thumbnails, and do not mistake resizing in a browser with HTML as a thumbnail.
If at all possible, view your site from a library or Internet Cafe computer to be sure that what looks good to you, also looks good to the average visitor.