Ten Commandments of Effective Web Site Design

I, Microsoft Explorer am not thy god. Thou shalt remember Firefox, Chrome, Safari and other browsers besides me. Explorer has not been the only game in town for a while. A good chunk of your market prefers Mozilla Firefox for its built-in security protocols, Chrome for its speed or Apple's Safari just for the heck of it. Don't alienate your customers. Check your work before release. Make sure it displays properly in all common browsers.

Thou shalt not impose thy musical stylings on thy audience. Perhaps your customer is discretely viewing the browser at work, prefers a different style of music or has a blazing headache. Don't have your music start every time your viewer opens a page. Iinstead, use plug-ins that let your customer choose whether to listen at all.

Thou shalt respect the boundaries of the written page-no horizontal scrolling. Vertical scrolling is okay, but don't expect customers to read text that bleeds right off the edge of the page.

Thou shalt not trigger thy customer's migraines, eyestrain, epilepsy or any other infirmities of thy customer. Flickering text can do that. Be careful when you use Flash.

Thou shalt not steal another's copyrighted work nor shall thou shalt not add unwanted scripts or spyware to thy customer's computer lest thou be cast out.

Thou shalt not be a stranger-- be sure thy website contains an order form or contact form.

Thou shalt not make thy customer's machine run like a dying turtle. When designing your site you may need to use richly layer .png files or other information rich formats. Make sure the finished images are compressed as possible to speed execution. Try JPEG.

Thou shalt use Web safe colors. This goes back to my earlier point about browsers. To avoid surprises choose your colors from the more limited Web Safe pallet. This will assure consistent rendering regardless of which browsers you choose.

Thou shalt not be mistaken for a kidnapper. Remember, your customer has to read what you write. Weird fonts, poor contrast between print and background, tiny fonts and other desecrations of basic typography assure that he will move on.

Thou shalt not abandon thy customer in the desert. When you add links to other sites, make sure that they appear as additional tabs when the customer opens them. If your links lead him off your site, he may never return.