By using tables you can get the flexibility to make your page appear well on any size screen resolution. A good table design is one that uses Percentages instead of fixed widths. That way, a screen will look good from 640x400 all the way up to 1600x1200.

If you have two or three columns on your site, set your table widths to each percentage, and let the browser work out the display. While testing, make sure to reset your screen width a few times and reboot to make sure your display is accurate in several different browsers and widths.

I will freely admit that there are certain page setups that are extremely difficult to get to flow right under different browsers. (take these pages for example). It was a very difficult choice we made to go with this style of setup, but it has worked very well for us. 2. No Java! Notice that not a single major search engine or large commercial site on the internet uses Java. Why? It is too slow loading on most peoples systems. Even Wired Digital took it off their site.

High bandwidth Java, Real Audio, or shockwave style plugins are out. Big time out (except specialty sites that can survive BECAUSE of the added content). Users that surf for information or products don't want to be distracted by site overhead. Play to the MTV attention span of a flea generation. (hey, wait-a-minute - thats me!)

3. No Flashing! Nothing drives users away, never to return, like flashing text, or abuse of animated gifs can. That scrolling banner text ranks right up their too.

4. Ban Those Banner Exchanges! Link Exchange is the great modern Internet myth of our time. I've talked to hundreds of people in-the-know about this subject, and the facts are simple - banner exchanges cost you repeat visitors in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Its like putting a DO NOT ENTER sign with a big skull and crossbones on your front door. Nothing spells Trailer Park like Link Exchange - your left wondering why your hit rate slowly fades away. It is one thing if you are getting paid for it - it is another entirely if you are giving it away.

5: Don't Abuse Images. I recently had someone ask me why their site couldn't get indexed on the search engines. I wasn't surprised when I looked at their site - 41 pages of pure images only - not a shred of text on the site. That is the worst case scenario of course, but you should keep pages under 64k (max) total graphics and text. Anything else, your losing your search engine food, and the load time is driving away users before the page ever loads.

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