• Keep webpages as short as you can. The web gets quite slow sometimes, and people get bored of waiting...
  • Do you really need that lengthy animation of the dancing gorilla? :-)
  • Graphics
    • Jpegs (mostly used for Photo scans) can often be compressed far more that the preset of the program you are using, e.g. ChangeFSI (the program which I use) defaults to 75% compression/quality, yet some things look fine at 30%. Certainly, not all things look OK at 30% though. Experiment.
    • GIFs (mostly used for drawn pictures) can often be optimised more - look at the palette of your GIF - allow your GIF creator to use only as many colours as your picture actually has (by default it won't!).
• Test your web-pages on as many different browsers that you can get your hands on - you'd perhaps be surprised how different browsers render your pages, especially if you've made some mistakes e.g. MicroSoft Internet Explorer goes rather wonky if you have one extra </center>; also versions prior to 5.01 can't display GIFs correctly.
• It's good practice to cater for 'older' browsers without certain features - it's not against the law to have an older browser, and it's often not difficult to accomodate them. You can do something called 'degrading gracefully' - i.e. if a browser can handle all the bells and whistles that your page can throw at it, fine, but if your page will still look OK on a browser which can't render these new-fangled features. Two such things are:
  • Tables - to allow your tables to be rendered readably on a non-tables browser, try stuffing a <br> at the end of the cell; a tables-enabled browser will ignore the <br> whilst a non-tables browser will ignore your <table> etc. and render the <br>. I've used this extensively on this site.
  • Frames - you can use <noframes> (which a frames enabled browser will ignore!), but I've only very rarely seen any sites which actually use frames in a convenient or sensible way (I've used them only once on my site)... think twice - do you really need to use frames?
    

1. Creating web-pages by had ensures that they will work well on all browsers!
2. It allows me to create compact, fast loading webpages
3. It's satisfying, and stops my brain from festering :-)

One of my reasons for buying an Acorn machine was to learn about computers (again), not just use one. No doubt that makes me a bit of a rarity in today's world, but I must say that I've got real satisfaction from doing all the code, graphics and animations by hand.
Also, having done it by hand I know that it will work with pretty well any browser, yet is quite attractive and informative (tell me if you think otherwise!) without using frames, Javascript, Java etc. - You may be surprised how many people either

• Can't use these 'advanced features' (there are lots of older computers still, especially PCs with Windows 3.1)
• Have them turned off!