DOs and DONTs of Personal Home Pages

Here are rules that I set for myself when developing a home page.

No Construction Signs.
Home Pages on the web by definition are deemed to be under construction always so never have a sign saying Under Construction or those graphics with a bent-back guy. Those signs were designed for the days of yore when the web was still coming up and for sites of firms whose site is not up and seriously want customers to come after a few days.


Small and Fast first page.
Never ever have a first page (homepage) which loads slow. So if you want to add that big photograph of yours bungee jumping, reserve it for later pages. If the first page takes too long people lose interest and move on to another wave to surf. If you a slow loading page somewhere on your location they might just skip and read some other page. The best thing to have on your first page is text with maybe pointers to all the big photographs and collections.


No gaudy colors.
All those fancy colors and blinking and flashing stuff is not for personal home pages. What people look for in home pages in text and associated material. All that dazzling stuff you can find anywhere on the net so why hurt some ones eyes with that yellow lettering on purple background. If you do not actually like plain gray default background you could try something like what I did. Use a gentle background with tinge of color. I chose a white background with rainbow dots. Its not so plain and also not so bad too.

Images
I hate those slow loading graphics. Even though most browsers support loading text first and then images many are too lazy to configure their browsers to do it. Have mercy and use thumb nails for images. I never have any images directly in my text using the IMG tag but I have links to images and I explicitly say that its an image. Also try to specify the WIDTH and HEIGHT since this makes the browsers job easier by allowing it to reserve some space and go ahead and display the text instead of waiting for the header of the image. At worst if you still insist on using inline images then for heavens sake at least make them interlaced ( there are many tools which do this ) so that even while displaying someone can see a rough image and exit if he/she does not want to see the clear image.

ALT tag
When they provide an ALT tag as part of IMG etc. tags, make use of it. ALT tag specifies what to display when the image cannot be displayed for various reasons. Use it especially for something like all those fancy lines out on the pages. Say something like ALT="----- ... ---" and browsers will atleast see some line instead of messy text.

Multi-Browser Compatibility
Okay! Agreed that guys who do not use Netscape maybe missing a lot of action. But still have mercy on the poor souls who use other browsers and especially those poor guys using text browsers like lynx on a modem line. Just have one look at your pages and see if they appear OK on lynx too. After all you want everyone to appreciate your home page don't you? I had a bad experience using the TABLE tag in my page and lynx ended up dead confused ( I am one of those who sometimes browse the web using T1 link on a 20 inch color monitor and sometimes over a 1.2K modem on a vt100 ).

Transperant GIFs
This is one point which makes your page more attractive and is not essentially an issue of style. When you use a background and use GIFs on the page with white background, what you see is a square hole on the page around the colorful GIF image. To avoid this you can use a tool giftrans which makes your GIF images transperant so wherever you have a white color (or any light color) the background of the page will show up instead of the background of the image. Makes your page look neat.