First and foremost: Never read any tutorial or FAQ! That's what you got
community leaders and lots of patient people in the help forum for, to
answer simple questions over and over again.
Use a lot of large images - short-sighted people will thank you.
Use the full colour depth and low compression to ensure high quality.
Everybody wants high quality, so they won't mind the slow loading.
It is completely unnecessary to use "alt" tags with images. Nobody reads them anyway.
Animated GIFs can bring life into a dull homepage. There can't be too
many of them!
Use many tags only your favourite browser understands. That way you can persuade
people to follow your example and use browser xxx.
Tell people which browser you have written your pages for by putting the
appropritate (animated) icon prominently on your page, if possible with a
link to the company's homepage. That way you can show how well you know the scene.
Best experimented with
Use colourful background images.
Everyone likes colours!
If you have a background image, you don't have to define the background colour
anymore.
Javascript and Applets are big fun. Use them everywhere you can. Testing them
before you publish the page isn't necessary. While they load, people have time at
last to contemplate the meaning of life.
Assign
different
colours
and sizes to every scrap of text.
cOMbinE iT wItH cHAngInG CAPitALiZaTIOn - It ShoWS hOW cOOL yoU ARe!
Use fixed widths for tables and layout. You can safely assume that nowadays
everyone has a 21" monitor and a graphics board that displays 64K colours at 1280x1024
resolution, so your page will fit into the browser window no problem. If not,
let people discover the joys of the horizontal scrollbar.
Show off your HTML knowhow by using frames. Do not bother with "noframe" tags
or links to noframe versions for frame haters. They're not worth the effort.
Oh, and use the "noresize" option - see above hint.
Its not kewl to obey spelling rulez. this isnt school, now is it? ppl
will undertand wot you have to say anywho, and theyll have something to
laugh about. But its no cause to be ashamed if you write "existance" instead
of "existence".
Use imagemaps and image links wherever you can. It's not your fault if people
don't load images! Alternative text links would only destroy your beautiful layout.
Blinking text attracts attention.
Everyone likes music, so a surfer will be happy to be greeted by a nice melody
after waiting for only 5 minutes for it to load. WAV files sound better than
MIDI, so it's a good idea to use them.
Put an "Under Construction" sign on every page, animated if possible. It's so
awfully unusual on the Web that pages are constantly changed that you have to let
people know about it.
Make the contrast between background colour and text small.
Grey text on white or dark blue on black look especially cool.
The status bar of the browser is a wonderful place to put additional info.
Who wants to know where a link leads anyway?
Do not use "height" and "width" definitions in image tags: If the text loads
before the image, people might be able to read through it before the image is loaded
and surf on. They mustn't go without having witnessed your efforts!
Put a counter, preferably one that loads from a different server, on top of your
page to show how popular your page is. Give your visitor the opportunity of fetching a
cup of coffee while waiting for the timeout if the other server is down.
Similarly, you can put your whole page into a huge table. That can gives
your visitors time to clean their flat/office or something useful like that.
There's nothing like JavaScript! Put an alert window asking the visitor's name
on your index page and greet them as "null" or "nobody" if they fail to enter
anything. Make sure that people have to navigate with the "back" button so that
they have to pass that window as often as possible. It's a good training in writing
their name!
Let other peoples' sites load in one of your frames. That way you keep visitors on
your site, prevent them from seeing the other site's URL and create wonderful effects
if that other site also uses frames.
Standard file types browsers can cope with, such as HTML, TXT, MID are out. Use
files that require many different plugins such as real audio, shockwave or - even
better! - the latest version of WinWord, Excel, Works, Access, Word Perfect... The
visitor always wanted an excuse to install all of them anyway.
Forget the "title" tag - only search engines ever need it for their lists.
People who don't remember what their bookmark points to should train their brains
by trying to figure out what "New Document" was.
Don't bother to test your internal or external links. People will write emails
telling you about it - what a contribution to global communication!
Search engines check pages for the words contained in them and rank them by
the number of occurences. Put a lot of hidden (e.g. white on white) text on your
page containing lots of popular words such as "sex", "teenage girls" to attact
hits from search engines. Whoever expects to see nudes will gladly wait for a
50KB-page to load.
This list is in no way comprehensive, but the collection should help you immensely
on your way to a really awful homepage nobody ever returns to.
