Issues of Style

This page is designed just to give the new user some general guidelines that might be nice to follow when designing web pages. They are by no means hard and fast rules, and are definitely subjective considerations.

  1. If possible, preview your page on all available browsers, Explorer, Safari and Mozilla to name a few. It's amazing how different things can look between all of them, and you don't want somebody to get a bad impression of your page just because they are using a different browser than you are.
  2. Don't make any pages too long. Notice that I broke this primer up into different sections. It would have worked fine as one large page, but it just becomes bulky, cumbersome, and difficult to read after awhile. It also saves on download time, not everybody is on a fast connection, and they may need to wait a long time for a long page to load.
  3. Use <body bgcolor=FFFFFF>. I just think a white background is so much nicer than grey. A lot of browsers do this by default nowadays, but it can't hurt
  4. I prefer NOT to use a background image. They add load time to the pages, and 9 out of 10 background images just make the text harder to read. If you do have a background which is particularily suitable, take some time to try to read your page and make sure that readability doesn't suffer.
  5. Never, ever, ever use blinking text! (I just checked this page out with Safari, which seems to ignore the blink tag, cool! But don't make users of other browsers suffer)
  6. Pay attention to your image sizes, and remember that not everyone has a fast internet connection. Use programs to compress images as much as you can such that they still look good.
  7. Most of all, remember that content is the most important thing of all.