10 Web Design Tips

These Web design tips are in no particular order. I choose them off the top of my head after a long day of working on other people's Web sites.

1. Don't put your email address on your web pages. Spammers use software to scrape email addresses from Web pages. Masking your email address with JavaScript will also mask it from visitors who have JavaScript disabled. Use a contact form instead.
2. Make your HTML titles elements descriptive of the content on the page. Each page should have a different HTML title. Search engines use the HTML titles to determine the overall content of the page.
3. Use clean urls. Instead of URLs like http://www.example.com/index.php?category=books&author=joshua%20
   slocum&title=sailing+alone+around+the+world&id=3543s, use URLs like http://www.example.com/books/joshua-slocum/sailing-alone-around-the-world. You can make clean URLs with mod_rewrite. Be sure that your URLs do not have session IDs in them.
4. Use a robots.txt file to block search engines robots from going where you don't want them to go. Periodically check where search engines are going by grepping your log files.
5. Each page on a Web site should only have one possible URL. That includes the home page.
6. Make your meta description tag different on every page.
7. Dont use IIS or other Microsoft products like FrontPage or Visual Studio to build Web sites. It is best to write your code from scratch, or use an open source content management system like Drupal or WordPress.
8. Familiarize yourself with GNU/Linux because you will probably spend a lot of time using Linux servers.
9. Don't make a splash page on your Web site. Splash pages create a hurdle for visitors and search engines. The home page should have your main content on it and it should include a significant amount of descriptive text.
10. Don't build a site that requires Flash, JavaScript, or Java to function correctly. You should be able to browse through the site's content with a text browser like Lynx.

Leave a comment if you have any to add.