• Email address: The email address written, not just a link. This eraust@yahoo.com rather than Please, Please email me. Not everyone's email software is linked to their browser. This has become even more important as many people have web based email.
  
  
• Which Browser: Some indication of which browser to use to get the most out of pages. Not essential, but helpful. There are numerous browsers that are going to be used to view your pages. The most popular being Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Explorer even these two browsers have their own way of doing things.
  
  
• Screen Size: What is the best screen size to correctly view the pages if other than 640x480. A lot of pages appear to be designed for 800x600 and don't show any thought of what they look like at 640x480. This is especially true for sites that use frames. Keep in mind that some Apple Mac users could be viewing with a width of only 470.
  My present theory is to design the pages for 640x480/800x600.
  
  
• Background sounds: The problems with the use of background sounds is not being able to give a visitor the option of hearing them or not. The other problem is that both Navigator and Explorer browsers require different HTML tags to enable them to work.
  Navigator:- <embed src="sound.mid">
  Explorer:- <bgsoung src="sound.mid" loop="-1">
  
  
• Borders and Scroll Bars: Screens only need one scroll bar. There is nothing worse than a frames page with six scroll bars and three borders. This is where being able to use frames comes in, as you'll find very few that work at 640x480. Frames pages are best used for database type work, for accessing large amounts of data or images.
  
  
• Colour co-ordination: Classic examples of this are dark blue on black, grey on green, green on orange/brown. Because screens and browsers vary so much, it is a good idea to spend 2 minutes thinking about the worse case scenario. Hard to read pages will turn people away quicker than a blank page and they probably will not come back either.
  
  
• <IMG SRC="" ALT="alt tag">: Make some use of the ALT tag in the IMG command for putting graphics on web pages. It gives people something to read while pic's are being down loaded. They can also be use to assist in navigation.
  
  
• Graphics files, size does matter: Graphics that are 10 and 20 times bigger in size, i.e. number of bytes, than they need to be, the bigger the file the longer the down load time and greater the probability that people will give up and go else where.
  
  
• Thumbnails: A thumbnail is a miniature of a larger picture. Use thumbnails so that people have a choice of down loading that 50K+ jpeg. A 6K gif file as a thumbnail will down load a lot faster.
  
  
• 216 Vs 256 Colours: If you're using 256 colours to produce graphics, try using the Macintosh/Netscape 216 colour palette. Makes the image more compatible with a larger number of browsers. After saving as 216 colour, then resave file as exact colours. A lot of images only use 50 or less out of the total 216 colours. It can cut the file size by 1/3.
  
  

It does not take much effort to place a small note at the bottom of your 'homepage' with some thing like:

Best viewed with netscape V3, 800x600 24bit colour
terbut@sprint.net.au

My intention is that all the pages on this site are an example of the above points. Feel free to copy the page layout for your next web pages.