I'm not going to push this alot. In fact, this is the only time I'm going to post anything about making money online. It is not what this blog is about. However, this was too good of an opportunity not to post.
Click the image below to read a website that talks about making money with your blog. Give me feedback on what you think about it.
Make sure your graphics load. Make sure that your links work. Where you link pages at other sites, review your links regularly to catch sites that have moved.
Validate your pages. Errors in your HTML can cause strange behavior, including information that doesn't display.
Look at your pages. It's truly amazing to see a page that doesn't even load correctly; it says that someone didn't care enough to look even once before putting that page on the web. While you're looking, make sure that the page displays the way you intended for it to display. Do this in several browsers; not all browsers implement the same tags, or implement them the same way. Browsers also tend not to follow HTML syntax faithfully; validation is no guarantee that any particular browser will render your page in a readable, useful manner.
If you find yourself defending the design of your pages, especially to the people who read them, but also to other designers, be open to the possibility that your pages really do have a design problem.
Remember that most people aren't going to tell you about errors or problems. If your content is worth staying for and the problems aren't too obnoxious, they may stay and read. Otherwise, they're likely to hit the back button and never come to your pages again. You'll never know how often that happens, so listen carefully when you do get feedback.
Better yet, seek out feedback from other designers. They'll be happy to tell you everything that you're doing wrong. You don't have to agree with them, but do listen carefully to their explanations of why they think some particular feature is a problem.
People learn in different ways. People behave in different ways. People's perceptions respond to different cues. So be good to everyone, and provide navigation that works in multiple ways.
This is one of the arguments for using both image maps and text. Some people are going to use the text links, even if they are loading graphics and the image map is right there on their screen.
There are other ways to provide useful redundancy, including horizontal linkage between pages at the same level in the same area (this can be either a complete mapping or threading, as appropriate), vertical linking (especially upward to all levels), including pages in more than one subject area when appropriate, putting cross-links in context within articles where it is appropriate, and for large sites, a site map page whose only purpose is to link to every page in the site in some organized manner. For site maps, it helps if every page links back to the site map as well. For the primary navigational links which provide structure to your site, be as consistent as possible about the placement of these links.
The "three-click rule" is important in navigation. It should be possible to get from any page in your site to any other page in your site with no more than three links. It's even better if there are multiple three-links-or-less paths, because different readers will try different paths between the same pair of pages.
There are a lot of things that go into this, more than some of the really awful sins. One pet peeve of mine is the auto-refresh. Please, let me decide when I want to go to the next page.
A more subtle interpretation of this is to make your page usable as quickly as possible, even before it is completely loaded. Don't force your reader to wait for netlag.
• Use height=nn and width=nn attributes on all of your images. Most browsers will format the page immediately and load the image later, so at least the text of your page is usable.
• Break long pages into several pages, unless the page really focuses on a single issue. (Long pages are most likely to be appropriate on detail pages, and least likely to be appreciated on your home page.)
• Use the top of each page to give the reader enough information to decide whether they want to stay on that page.
There are other ways of taking control away from the user. Frames are bad about this, because they take up valuable screen space, and most framed sites don't give you a way to make the frames go away.
Keep your hands off the status line! Status-line crawlers are a popular toy, but they take away link information that the user may consider more important than your crawler. (Not to mention that crawlers, either in the status line or elsewhere, are nearly as evil and distracting as blinking text.) Some people also use JavaScript to put link descriptions in the status line when the mouse is over a link. If you have a link description that's that good, use it for the link text. Again, you're taking the URL away from the reader at exactly the moment that they're likely to be looking at the status line to see where a link is going to take them.
Background sound is another bad idea; most sounds are fairly large, and a reader should be able to choose whether they want to spend the time waiting for a large download. The same is true of large graphics; give readers a thumbnail to select, and let them know before they select that they're going to be downloading something huge.
Being cool generally means that your web site isn't so cool. "Cool" generally seems to mean distractions, self-promotion, and such. A lot of it is counter-productive.
The human visual system tracks to motion. This is why blink is so evil, and why animated gifs are distracting. At first, these things sound great: "I want this to be noticed!" The question is whether you want your reader to see anything else on your page. Every blink, every movement, is going to draw attention away from everything else. And if you use these to draw attention to something adjacent to them, such as text, their mere presence will be extremely annoying when the reader is trying to read what you want them to read.
Background graphics is another way for coolness to interfere with your website. Most backgrounds, even lightly textured ones, reduce legibility of plain text. Different browsers--even different versions of the same browser--differ considerably in the amount of contrast displayed in a background, so what looks OK to you might not be legible to someone else. Solid colors that contrast strongly with text colors are really the only way to ensure legibility.
It should go without saying that high-contrast or extremely busy backgrounds are really very un-cool. It should go without saying, but there are some really hideous backgrounds on the web that totally destroy their pages.
Understatement works surprisingly well on the web. Remember that when your page comes up, your reader will be completely focused on it. So know what it is that you want to say, then say it and be done with it. If you've done your job well, you'll get your point across. If you haven't, no amount of cool is going to compensate.
If a person has been using a web browser long enough to find your page, they probably understand what a link is, and how to activate it. It is not necessary to tell your reader to "click here."
