Keep your pages simple, small, and short. When was the last time you waded through a website's page that went on forever or waited while it took ages to load? Keep the file size of your pages small. Try to keep the load time under 30 seconds (at 56k) for your home page especially.

Use text! Search engines love text because they have no idea what's in an image, logo, photo, etc. If you've read the W3C QA Tips you'll already know that you should always use the alt attribute for images.

Stick to standard fonts such as Times, Verdana or Arial so text appears correctly across different browsers and platforms. Remember, if you pick a font that's not on the viewers computer the browser will substitute it for another.

Images should be smaller than 20K. For images that need to be bigger (e.g. photos) create thumbnail that links to the larger image on another page. Show the amount of Kilobytes for each of the larger images so experienced surfers can estimate the approximate load time.

Keep in mind the width of the surfer's screen. A lot of people still have their resolution set to 800 x 600 pixels so if your page is wider than 780 pixels they will have to scroll to the right. On the other hand some surfers (especially the experienced ones) will have higher resolutions (as high as 1920 x 1200 pixels or higher!). So what do you do? Make the page stretch. Use proportional values so the page will grow or shrink so it always looks right.

Give the surfer enough information on your home page so he/she will know what your site is all about.

Don't publish personal information unless it's absolutely necessary. There are a lot of weirdo's out there.

Provide new information on a regular basis so surfers will return. Not only that, search engines will return more often too! You could create interactive features, links to changing information but make sure to keep your site fresh, something new every day (or at least every week).

Avoid long lists of links to other sites, that's just boring but get as many sites as you can to like to you.

Every page on you site should contain a link to your home page. Imagine the surfer that has landed in the middle of your site from a search engine but has no idea what's going on.

Provide contact information for comments from readers but do not put an email address directly on a page because you'll end up getting spammed. Use a contact form if possible. Check out the anti-spam links provided for more tips.

As a rule keep filenames in lowercase, to a max of 32 characters (inc. extension). Filenames should reflect their content, use keywords and separate them with a hyphen (-) not an underscore (_). Believe me, there is a difference!

Check your links. After you've uploaded you site make sure it works. Click on every link and regularly check links that lead to other sites.