10 commandments for a bad homepage

1. Breaking or Slowing Down the Back Button
2. Opening New Browser Windows
3. Non-Standard Use of GUI Widgets
4. Lack of Biographies
5. Lack of Archives
6. Moving Pages to New URLs
7. Headlines That Make No Sense Out of Context
8. Jumping at the Latest Internet Buzzword
9. Slow Server Response Times
10. Anything That Looks Like Advertising

I rescued this nodeshell all by myself :)

For those of producing home pages, as opposed to sites, please learn the following (which came from an internal document at work I wrote, called "My website is 3l1t33")

• The number of fonts on a home page is not directly proportional to the greatness of a page
• The <h*> tags are there for headings, 3d images are not
• Serif fonts are not good at small point sizes.
• Enforcing javascript usage is evil
• Enforcing javascript usage just to get a ticker in the status bar of a browser means you will go to hell.
• The <blink> tag was created by a psychotic.
• ALT tags are not optional
• DTDs are not optional.
• .5mb images are not useful, not matter what your friend who works in marketing says.
• Do you really have to use flash?
• Java is not "write once, run anywhere". Sun kidnapped Microsoft marketing people to produce this slogan.
• Not everyone has a 21" monitor

  And finally

• When you produce a web site in this office, I will check it on Mosaic

The web designers are scared of me ... :)

There's one web-design commandment that a lot of web developers miss completely:

Don't obsess over one tool to the exclusion of others.¹ The worst offenders are those HTML-only monkeys who use <META> elements to

• Redirect the user to another page
• Indicate character set²
• Control spiders and bots
• ...

These things are not metadata about the document! Further, there are those who use CGI scripts³ to the complete exclusion of static HTML or simple server-side includes. And those who believe the web is just a handy container for Shockwave. Or don't know you can GET using a form.

In short, it's bad. Don't do it.

¹Yes, this commandment applies to virtually anything. Web developers seem particularly vulnerable to it.

²This is almost excusable, because the standard validation tools out there don't make the right way to indicate character encoding particularly obvious. Frequently it requires knowing the quirks of your httpd intimately.

³Choose Your Own Damn Dynamic Content System