Ten Tips for Professional-Looking Five-Minute Websites
The ultimate guide for lazy programmers
1. Use ANYTHING but Times New Roman. Make sure that all of the text is in the same font (or in the right font), and that none of it whatsoever is in Times New Roman. Nothing says "sloppy work" like not changing your font.
2. Coloured scrollbars. For users of IE, this brings a page seamlessly together (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox etc. don't display them, but that is expected by users and so is not much of a problem). Putting: <style> HTML {scrollbar-base-color: purple} </style> in the head section is the easiest way to do that.
3. Make sure it works on 640x480 resolutions, WITHOUT horizontal scrollbars.
4. Use bold, italic or underlined text to emphasize - you don't need to put everything in capitals.
5. Remove the borders on hyperlink images, by putting border=0 in the image tag.
6. If you have adverts, make sure they don't interfere with the content flow on your page - stick them at the top, bottom or at the edges but not in the middle of a block of text.
7. Two words: Proof Read. If your spelling is a bit shaky, try using a spell-checker.
8. Make sure all links go where they're supposed to.
9. Instead of just leaving big blocks of text left-aligned, put them as justified. You do this by putting <p style="text-align:justified"> before the paragraph.
10. Make sure the colours don't clash - don't have bright green and bright yellow text next to each other.
About the Author
Beth McMillan is an A-level student in England who has been making websites since she was nine.
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