It's not rocket science

The shopping experience, I have to tell you, was just short of excruciating, so the products had better be pretty snazzy to make up for that. Everything at reflect.com is presented in the form of a graphic with a rollover. On a DSL connection it was absurdly slow here at 2 a.m. I hate to think what somebody on a modem would suffer. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to tell it that I really wanted a lipstick about a shade darker than what it suggested.

Which brings me to the subjects of web sites that suck. Basically, there are two reasons a web site can suck: one, because it has no content; two, because the proprietor has no clue what he or she is doing. It is not that hard to get a clue, and it's your own fault if you won't.

You have to fully think a site through before you put it up; a web site should be easy to navigate and have a consistent visual style so you know where you are. If you're going to do a whole lot of random things on your web site, organize them in a way they make sense to you, but try thinking about your structure from the perspective of a visitor who didn't create all those pages.

I'm not saying that nobody wants to see pictures of your cat and your children, put them on the front page if you want. You love your pets and kids, there's no good reason not to show them off. Just, if you're going to have 60 pictures of Fluffy and little Justin, make a separate directory for them. Choose your favorite and then link the rest from that page.

Oh, and if you expect to have repeat visitors, ever, make sure you don't use yellow as a visited link color. Bad idea.

Keep your graphics clean and simple. Make sure there's plenty of white space on your pages, and don't make your users scroll too much. If you have that much information to present, make a second page.

Unless you are an animator, do not use animations. Especially do not use canned animations.

Run your text through a spell-checker. If you won't do this for yourself, do it for me.

Update your content on a regular basis. If your site is about your family, how are they doing? What's the latest? If your site is about Britney Spears, how do you like her new video? If your site is about the Dallas Cowboys... wow, am I sorry for you.

It's been said time and time again that the key to having a good web site is letting it be about something you care about. My other piece of advice is that you shouldn't be afraid to try new things or ask people for advice. It used to be that you could look at the source for a page and see how it was done; that's no longer true, necessarily, but you could still write an e-mail to the author of the page and say "that was cool, how'd you do it?"

It may go without saying that I'm thinking about putting a personal web site back together for the first time in about three years. I've had a domain for a while now, and today I came up with a decent organizational scheme. That was kind of fun, actually.

So these pieces of advice could be said to be for me as much as they are for anybody else.

before - after