- If your site's content can be turned into a widget somehow, such as with an RSS feed or just a mini version of your site (ex. the puzzles widget on this site) - do so - and then submit your widget to all the major widget-oriented websites such as iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Facebook, Live, Widgetbox and Widgipedia - it will help drive a LOT of traffic to your site - think of it as a great form of content syndication.
- Do NOT: have a public link exchange on your site, sign your site up on link farms or on SEO directories - this will lower your rankings on Google a lot - take it from experience.
- Though CSS can replicate the styling brought from these tags, search bots love them - so they're worth using for SEO purposes: <h1> - <h5>, <strong>, <em>.
- Make sure your site supports the big four: Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.5+, Opera, and Safari.
- Make sure your site fits down to a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution.
- Use the color wheel when creating layout themes. Try to keep your site layout down to three distinct colors.
- Create a website shell (a.k.a. template), so that if you decide to make another website down the road, it will be a lot quicker to make because you'll already have a framework set up.
- Create a to-do list for your site so you don't forget anything as it grows bigger - I like to jot sudden ideas I get down on it too.
- A successful website provides a service to its users - such as teaching (Wikipedia) and/or social networking (Facebook).
- Whenever possible, use onmousedown instead of onclick - it's ~100ms faster.
- Use file compression for your javascript and web page files so that your pages load faster - also if you can, put the script include tags at the bottom of your page - this will give the illusion that your site loads faster because browsers usually comb through an entire js file before continuing on with loading the rest of your page.
- If you have a rails site, I suggest checking out Mongrel and Monit for Mongrel (or God) if you are currently using Apache with FastCGI. You may notice your app is a lot faster with Mongrel clustering than on FastCGI.
- This one is more of a for-your-health point, but our eyes naturally look slightly downwards - so if your computer screen is straight in front of you at eye level or higher, trying moving it down to neck or chest level - you may notice that your eyes feel more relaxed -- (I learned this last point from an eye doctor and feel that it helps me.)
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