Designing good pages for the Web requires some very distinct artistic guidelines.
See it like your visitor
If your site isn't easy to view for your visitors, you've failed to achieve your goal, regardless of how cool your design is. The average user has a 640x480 screen, 14.4 or 28.8 modem, and often as little as 256 color video. They appreciate a site that loads fast and gets them where they want to go in as few clicks as possible. Part of this is using clever design to reduce the download size of pages. Every time you can reduce the size of a graphic, you've moved closer to making the perfect site. This doesn't mean you should be using tiny little unreadable graphics. It means that when you do choose to use a graphic, you should be making the best use of the download time. If you have to create a graphic with large areas of white space, step back and consider what you're doing - there is something fundamentally inefficient going on.
Simple list of guidelines for building good Web pages:
A. Text and hypertext links should be readable against the background. Use proper spelling and punctuation.
B. Background colors and patterns help a page stand out, but they can be in the way if they make it hard to load or read. Bear in mind that many readers will be viewing your page at 256 colors, so any higher-resolution colors will be lost and may create undesirable effects. As a general rule, if your site has lots of text use a light colored background. If your pages are heavy on graphics and light on text, than go ahead and use more dynamic background patterns.
C. Graphics and animation can brighten a page, but keep them simple for quick downloading. Avoid adding more than 4-5 animations and text FX per page.
D. Navigation links at the bottom of each Web Page provide a guide so your readers won't get lost. Provide text-only links for users who turn off graphics loading in their browsers to improve speed. (Remember to use our Add Page Links feature in the Cool Stuff Gallery!!)
E. Page dimensions should be no larger than the browser window size; keep in mind that many readers have their screen resolution set to 640 by 480 pixels.