Use humor carefully - Be careful and monitor how you use sarcasm or humor on your page, because your message may not be received in the spirit it was meant.

Check your spelling - A misspelled word can change the mood of the message.

Keep it short - Keep paragraphs short and succinct. Focus on one subject per message area. Separate subjects by lines or spaces. Just make sure the themes do not run together and confuse the view and convey incorrect information.

Make sure it's correct - Make sure calendars have correct information. If you’re not sure…..Don’t post. It is better to have no information and keep looking for it, than the wrong information and miss the event.

Keep the content up-to-date - Give people a reason to return. If they see the same thing every time they check in, they will stop checking in.

Make options obvious - If a thing can be clicked, it should look "clickable" - Flash, image maps, image links

Scrolling text - While Marquees were used by everyone for a while, they are passe these days. Movement draws the eyes, but the text is generally jerky, so they are only used by people looking for a "cool" factor.

Boomerang hyperlinks - Don’t have hyperlinks to the same page as the hyperlink. This just confuses and disorientates the user. Either take out the link or gray it out.

Links to Elsewhere - Be careful how you link to other sites (unless your site is predominantly links to other sites). You want your visitors to look at your site before surfing off elsewhere.

Use Your Defaults - The issue is the color of your hyperlinks, which you do have control over. Should you use the default colors or not? Browser defaults are blue for hyperlinks and purple for hyperlinks to previously visited sites. If you want to look at it from a purely navigational approach, you should stick to the defaults. Rather than changing the standard color system and disorientating your visitors, take advantage of a system the user is familiar with.

Dead Ends - Don’t have any. The last page of a section should have links to other pages in your site, as well as a link to the front page of that section. And I’m not referring to the navigation bar either.

Graphics - Keep ‘em small! Web publishing is constantly a battle against low bandwidth, no more so in creating graphics. While well designed graphics can transform a good site into a great site, large graphics can slow a site down to a snail crawl. Here we’ll look at how to minimize your files’ sizes while still designing attractive graphics.

Minimize download times - A picture is worth a thousand words, particularly when downloading over the Internet. Have a thought for your visitors, many of whom are using 14.4 Kbps modems or slower. Graphics carry much more information than text, so a screen of graphics come up considerably slower than a screen full of text. A page overloaded with graphics can take so long to download that users will give up in disgust and go elsewhere. Your job is to prevent this by minimizing the time it takes for your graphics to download.

Minimize the number of graphics - Don’t be too extravagant. Try to avoid using graphics where text will do. Large chunky headings are the classic example of redundant graphics. Remove any images that don’t need to be there.

Minimize colors - When using GIFs, you can reduce the number of colors it uses. This can substantially reduce the size of the graphic. To make sure your graphics look the same on all systems, you should use Netscape’s 216 color palette.

Minimize the number of different graphics - Try and repeat graphics if possible. Most browsers cache graphics. This means the images are stored on your computer so the graphic doesn’t need to be downloaded more than once. If it works, repeat the same graphic on different pages rather than create new graphics. An example is when creating your own bullets. Rather than use lots of different bullets, repeat the same one.

Minimize the size of your graphics - Large graphics like image maps take a painfully long time to download. Most people have very short attention spans and won’t wait around for them. Try and keep your graphics as small as possible while still looking good, particularly on your home page. An interesting quote I read recommended holding your breath for as long as it takes your page to load. If you pass out, your images are too big!

Minimize Animation - Avoid gratuitous use of animated graphics. Not only do they take longer to download than normal graphics, they can distract your visitor from the text on your page (unless this was the purpose, of course). The speed that animated GIFs run at depends on the visitor’s computer, so it can vary from blindingly fast to frustratingly slow. They’re not very reliable and the negatives outweigh the positives.

Stay away from Frames - As discussed in Technology, frames cause more problems than they are worth. Find another way to accomplish your goals.