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James's Basic Rules For Success

First thing you need to make sure of is that your page isn't a pain in the arse to view. What do I mean by that???
    1) Don't bog-down the download time.
You must first understand that when you view a page it first has to download (take the files off the server) and store them on your hard drive somewhere. Just trust me on that one. What I mean by not bogging down the download time is simply don't put too many things or too big of things on one page, or pages that are expected to load together (if you have frames. ) For example don't put a ton of animated .Gif files or a ton of pictures or a ton of anyting on any given page in your site. It's a pain in the arse to deal with when your browser can't handle it or you can "go wash a car" and come back and have just finished getting the page. Plus the factor comes in that if you have a huge part of a website on one page, the viewer is more likely not to want to see it, they like smaller things, more specialized. That brings us to the next topic...

    2) Different things go in different spots.
What I mean by that is how would you like it if you bought a car and the side-view mirrors were on the roof and the engine was in seat next to ya??? You wouldn't. Well, it's the same with web pages, you must have different things in different places, it's called organization! Keep your site organized and easy to get around... which brings us to numero tres....

   3) Make it easy to move around.
You need to try to make it easy for someone with NO clue of the lay out of your site to easily get somewhere you want them to have access to at almost any point in their visit. They need to have a clean format... but that leads us to #4...

   4) Formatting the page.
By format I'm talking about how the page looks in the browser. You need to keep in mind that with each browser the HTML coding is interpretation is different in tiny little ways. This means basically that you need to look through each browser and see how your page looks. Your page could look spiffy in Netscape and then not so good in a sucky browser like AOL's or Internet Explorer. Just have to try it out, or add a little sign to the effects of "Best viewed in ..." Its also best to leave the darker colors to the people who know what they're doing in HTML...

   5) Be known.
What I mean by that is ok, you have this terrific (or not so terriffic) site but no ones going to it unless you feed them the URL... why not? Because you didnt' submit to any search engines!!! You need to submit to lotsa search engines, then your "hits" will start rolling in.


    6)Choose The Right Combination
What is meant by this is simply choose the right combo of color schemes. Don't do anything so retarded as to assign several things the same color, you want those links to jump off the page in color and the background needs to be the right color so the text is EASILY seen. Some may complain, if they're running 16 color for examply, but you need to aim for the general population and try to please the majority. See my color chart for good colors, most of the shades available.
 

That's all that I can think of for now, but I'll add more soon. If you have anything that you feel people need to know for having a more successful site, e-mail me and lemme know!