note: dont forget to add line break after disallow just to make sure it disallow nothing

I’ve compiled a small list (or rant) of some very basic and fundamental rules that all webmasters must learn and respect when developing a website that needs to make actual money. This list can also be used by companies looking to hire a web development firm or to evaluate an already deployed website project.

I’ll start off slow and easy…

1. DO NOT resize the user’s browser window, EVER. I know you can, I know you feel really cool when you put that little Javacrap on your page and like a little miracle the browser window resizes to your wishes, but NO. You see this atrocious web technique mostly with spam sites and when “designers” design websites. That is, someone in the photo/video/art industry who “also makes websites” (see #6 for more on that), but in reality has no idea how to make a successful ecommerce website.

2. If your website requires the visitor to load your home page, and then “launch” your real website in a pop up, YOU LOSE. Pack it up, send it home, start over. If your website doesn’t load immediately on your home page and deliver your message within a couple of seconds it’s pretty damn hard to keep people along for the show (not matter how cool and Flashtacular it is). I see this technique mostly with Flash web developers, who for some reason think all flash websites must load in a pop up window (assuming it can get past pop up blockers), and have 30 second loading sequences and look curiously like 2advanced.net

3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE. See above for the explanation on this one as they’re related. It’s like asking your customer if they’d like to enter your crappy store or your better store (but the ‘better’ store requires special glasses and a little 30 second wait…um NO THANKS), what you’re really asking them is “do you want to leave and buy from my competitor because I’ve put up a crappy roadblock before you even know what I sell?”.

4. If your website is ALL Flash, FIRE your web development company, and if you made it, add it to your portfolio under “Useless web projects I’ve done” and start over. Flash it just a tool, a wonderful powerful tool for delivering animation, video, interfaces, shopping carts, functionality etc. the list goes on, it kicks ass. This DOES NOT MEAN you need to create your entire website in Flash, and if you do you will be at a severe disadvantage to your wiser competitors. Look at it this way, even Macromedia/Adobe, the maker of Flash doesn’t have an all Flash website, do you think there’s a reason why? Oh yeah, they want to make actual money and don’t listen to ‘designers’.

5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation. Put it on the top, the left, hell even the right will work but do not try to reinvent the way people interact with digital interfaces while trying to actually sell your product or service. People will get confused, then annoyed, then pissed, then gone.

6. This one is going to get me in trouble. If you are a print designer, and “do websites on the side”, STOP DOING websites and providing “advice” to your print clients about web design. Print design to web design is like designing an ad for a race car, and actually building and racing that race car. Don’t get me wrong, print is great and all, you make pretty pictures and wonderful messages crafted with great copy, but when it comes down to it, it’s still just a picture. People cannot buy the product with a print ad (yet), they can’t communicate with your business through a print ad. I can already here the grumbling coming from the print world, and look, it’s not that I don’t see a purpose for print advertising, just stick to print and don’t nose you’re way into a medium which you do not know and wouldn’t understand (same goes for general “geeks” who do websites ‘on the side’)

7. If you do not have sufficient copy, or any REAL TEXT on your home page (not in an image), and to a lesser extent your whole site, hire a copywriter and fire your webmaster NOW. Content is King, repeat after me CONTENT IS KING. Search engines don’t index fancy graphics and Flash, they index text. Good ol’ reliable text. If you don’t know how much text, or how to write good text, hire somebody who does (it’s essential to your ranking and to selling your product or service).

8. If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS. Yes in most markets Firefox only commands at most a 10-15% market share, but for some sites it’s much higher (my other site Oomny.com has 80% Firefox users). Furthermore, if the morons you hired didn’t make your site and functionality compatible with Firefox they obviously have no idea what they’re doing, and aren’t up on their game. I have no idea why you would need a website, or functionality system that is so dependent on IE that it simply can’t work in Firefox, and frankly it doesn’t matter because there is no good reason. The lack of Firefox knowledge by a webmaster shows they aren’t of the Internet culture, and that’s a bad sign if you’re a business owner.

9. Commandment 9 is a collection of small issues that have been beaten to death other places, and are quote common principles, but bear repeating. No blinking text, no Frontpage, no pop-ups (even requested), no scrolling text, no font downloads, and no Flash intros. If your product or service needs a flash intro to sell, it probably sucks.

10. If you use music on your site make sure the user can stop it, and it BETTER NOT start on page load without the user requesting it. Same goes for video with audio (*cough web users surf from work and don’t enjoy their speakers lighting up with your horrible and intrusive taste in music while their boss roams the halls looking for some ass to bust.)

11. Text navigations are better than images, this isn’t a big deal but it’s better to use text for your nav with some clever CSS, then to export a large and bloated mouseover image navigation. I know Dreamweaver makes it so super simple, but you’ll benefit in a lot of other ways without it. Images wisely used, just like Flash are excellent, but don’t rely always on mouseover graphics to deliver your image, design is more about content than designing the interface (do you know any of your friends that raves about the iPods elegant interface? No, and that’s the point, it just works)

12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”.
Simply put, drops downs never work quite right, and only a few of the ones I have seen actually are usable. Furthermore, the use of drop downs usually means that the person organizing the content did a piss poor job of it. If you have the mother of all sites and need people to access hundreds of pages, you’re probably Microsoft or CNET and you’re ignoring me anyways.

13. If your site needs a search engine for users to find information, it’s time to start over and fire the guy who came up with the site map (and those slick drop downs on your nav). Search engines are wonderful, and play a great role on some great sites, but if you lean on it for users to find content you’re pissing 50%+ of your customers off. Some people like to browse, they also like to search if they NEED to. Give them a logical browse option and they won’t need to search, but leave search there for the advanced users really digging into your vast amount of content (and you do have LOTS of content to be indexed right? If not see #7)

14. Load time is still a factor for over 50% of American web surfers. Even though you live in the wonderful world of Cable and DSL, half of America does not and hates you for it. If you design your site for only broadband users you’re sending a message, “Every other customer can bite me�?. Bloat is simply NOT ALLOWED on the home page, but it can be used deeper in when users request it specifically.

15. This one seems obvious but isn’t to some people *cough Designers *cough. Do not HIDE your message, and don’t OBSCURE what you want the user to do. Home page design is like a billboard, hit them with a message and a desired path (buy now) in 1-2 seconds, but provide information for people who want to dig deeper and research.

16. If you lead the user through a pre-determined path in order to deliver a message or demo, it’s time to get an ANT farm and take your controlling wills out on some species that will actually like it. The web is about modular content, it’s not an “experience” or a “wonder tour of magical enchantment”. If you have to have a slideshow, put thumbnails there too so people can get the content they want when they want it. If you’re demo has 20 pages, give them a table of contents or at least some next/previous buttons so they can fast forward (they’d be wathcing broadcast TV if they wanted content shoved down their throats at a pace decided by the man). Pushing people through a demo, no matter how complex 1 step at a time is a mistake and will lead to the inevitable; annoyance. And if you’re purpose of reloading the page to deliver the next slide in a slide show is to increase your ad impressions, you should DIE (see SI.com, Time.com and CNN)

17. If you’re delivering video, it better not ask the user which bandwidth or version of video they’d like. Real Player, 100K, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, WMV, 300K, AVI, Cable, DSL, Dial-Up? NO THANK YOU. Deliver your video in an embedded player in Flash. I’m sorry, Flash won this battle a long time ago (see YouTube), it has the install base, the lean interface and isn’t trying to get you to join “their world” of media player fantasy where they place system tray icons and launch helpers and pop up every time you pop in a CD or DVD. Flash is cross platform and cross browser compatible, something none of the other providers can say.

18. This is a small one, but if the user has to mouse over your graphic or small image to know what it is, or where it will take them if its a link, quit your job and be a magician or a blackjack dealer, making web interfaces is not for you.

19. This final commandment is related to many of the above ideas, and is a good guiding principle for web geeks that are excited about new tech and want to use it. Just because a technology is new, or you just discovered it does not make it suitable to put on a business website, JUST BECAUSE you can. This happened with Flash, Java, and is now happening with AJAX. Yes new technology is cool, but only integrate it on a business site if it improves the customers experience or sells more product/service. Technology for the sake of technology is silly and only belongs on your personal show-off site, or your own computer where not one will be exposed to its horrid creativity except you.
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One might say that if you followed all of my commandments, the web would be a boring, dry and conformist web of sites only engineered for 1 thing; selling. And you’re right, but thankfully the world is full of plenty so called “creative” people and they keep it interesting for the rest of us.

cartooncorpse and jcs on Reddit.com suggested 4 more:

1. Don’t link to PDF content without disclosing the link.

2. Don’t employ any scripts to prevent the user from “Backing” out of the site with the browser’s back button. Ever try locking someone in your store? do they usually buy something?

3. if your website says “you’re” where it should say “your”, you should fire the person that wrote it.

4. If your website has LOTS of random words in all capital LETTERS because the author was TRYING to emphasize words without the or tags that were created for exactly this purpose, he should be fired.

5. It goes without saying but Taladar suggests; No pop ups and no javascript links (breaks open in new tab).

While more and more people are getting access to high speed internet, there are many left on dial up. Be kind to those visitors and do a few, simple things to speed up your webpages. Not only will these tips give you a faster load time, most will also help keep your bandwidth fees low as well!

Use CSS For Faster Pages

Even if you decide to use tables, CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time! With your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. Also it cuts down on long drawn out tags and replaces them with smaller class styles instead.

Use External Scripts

Use the same script on multiple pages? Switch to an external script. I’m not talking about remotely hosted, I mean loading javascript files from one source instead of adding all that code to each of your pages like this:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”yourscript.js”></script>

That way the browser already has it in it’s cache and won’t have to read it each time another page loads. This one saves a ton of load time, specially for larger scripts!

Remove Anything You Don’t Really Need

OK, while this might sound obvious sometimes the hardest thing about creating a website is not using every fancy trick that you know. Images, flash and sometimes even sound files are very impressive.. but do you really need to showcase all your talents one one page?

Embedded sound files are something many people just find annoying anyway. You’d be surprised how many are surfing at work . The last thing anyone wants is a loud music or sounds announcing to their boss that they’re surfing. Also many people have their own music playing… hearing a song over top of what we’re listening to is less than pleasant. As for Java applets, try to ditch them or if you want those effects, JavaScript unusually loads faster and can do just as much or more. Stand back and take a critical look at your website, you may see a few special effects that can be let go of for the sake of faster load time.

Avoid Nested Tables

OK, I’m not a big fan of using tables for layout anyway (I’m one of those people that believes content and presentation should be separate.. but thats another tip page). With that said, if in your templates tables seem neccessary (or the easier way to do it), try to avoid nesting. Why? When you place a table inside another table, it takes a lot longer for the browser to work out the spacing since it has to wait to read the entire html and then work out the layout. If at all possible, try using CSS to create the columns on your page.

Avoid Full Page Tables for Faster Rendering

If you use tables, try avoiding the whole page being one big table. The browser won’t show anything until it’s read the whole thing that way. For a faster loading webpage, either try multiple tables (not nested) or having stuff above the main table to make your content in the first table show up faster. That way your visitors will have something to read while the rest of your page loads. It may not really make you page faster, but it will feel like it to your visitors.

Split Up Long Pages - Multiple Short Pages Load Faster

By splitting up long pages into multiple pages you not only make the content show up faster but many people that see a very long scroll bar give up. Remember, people’s attention spans are often shorter than a grasshoppers (OK, not literally, but you get my point) since so much information is available at our fingertips. Try breaking it up into more readable lengths.

Remove Excess “Whitespace”

Whitespace is the spaces between your coding, removing the unneeded tabs and spaces can help a lot! Doing this will take a lot of extra bytes off the total size of your page and will speed up load time quite a bit. (Careful using automatic squishers, I find they often squish too much and makes it rather hard to edit later.)

Keep Your Code Clean

If you do use a wysiwyg editor, most times the will add useless code to your pages for example, many will leave empty tags (ie. <font> </font>). Removing any of those excess tags will not only speed up your load time, but make you pages validate a lot cleaner.
Speed up Images Load Time
Don’t Go Overboard On Images

While images can greatly enhance the look of a site they can really slow it down if there are too many. Try to decide if all your images are really needed (quite a few nice effects can be done with css, so sometimes images are unneeded.)
Height And Width Tags

When the page loads and the image size is already defined (ie. you’ve used the height and width tags), the browser knows where everything will be before the images are loaded. Otherwise the page has to wait and load the images before the text. Same goes for tables, so try to use width tags when possible on those as well for a speedier page.

Faster Images? Reduce Their File Size

There are many totally free, online image optimizers so you don’t even have to install anything and it’s extremely easy! Online Image Optimizer will greatly reduce the file size of your gif, jpg, or pngs and neither you or your visitors will be able to see the difference other than a page that loads a heck of a lot faster. They also keep the transparency and animations in gifs! For another JPEG reduction, try JPEG Wizard, also free, this one will only work with pictures in your hard drive not ones from the net. You can also choose some simple effects to be done (flip, mirror and rotate).

GIF vs JPG vs PNG

Personally on new sites I design I tend to go for optimized pngs. They have lossless compression (unlike jpgs and can be used without worry (gifs have the potential to have copyright issues) and load fast! With all that said, if you still want to use gifs and jpgs, here’s a bit of fast info… If you don’t need sharp resolution, choose GIFs over JPEGs, as GIFs generally load quicker. JPGs are generally best for photos, GIFs for anything else.

(I’d add a rant here about how Microsoft had held up the web’s development with not making IE6 support png transparency… but *sigh* I’ve ranted about this already to anyone who will listen. Firefox, Opera and other modern browsers however have been able to show alpha transparency in png for years… oops, sorry, that was a mini rant after all!)