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This was taken directly from my CHP newsletter.
All credits go to Tim Donahue/CHP.

A recently located instruction manual, scrawled on a series of
old Denny's napkins, and located in the backseat of Tim
Berners-Lee's car for over 6 years has revealed the lost
10 Commandments of Web Design - now made public, exclusively at
Coolhomepages.com!


Commandment 1:
Thou shalt be clear about what the hell thou art presenting
to the user. Unless your user is the Amazing Karnac.

Commandment 2:
Thou shalt design the site so that it's appropriate for your
audience. Don't use a dark Tomb-Raider theme if you're an
online shoe store or a financial service.

Commandment 3:
Thou shalt not use java applets unless Moses himself comes
to your office and insists that you should.

Commandment 4:
Thou shalt not force a user to wait for a megabyte or more
of Flash file downloading as the first thing they experience
at your site.

Commandment 5:
Thou shalt make the more important parts of any given page
layout more prominent than the less important parts of
your page.

Look at the newspaper. The front page headline
is the biggest. There's a good-sized page 1 photo keeps the
page from becoming a visual wasteland of black type. There
are headlines above each story. There are sub-heads within
some stories. The body copy is legible, but not too big or
too small. The author bylines are small. There is a menu
somewhere on the page telling you how to find movies,
sports, etc. The page is organized in easy to understand
columns. There's a reason why every major newspaper in the
world adheres to these basic design principles.

Don't make your web designs look like newspapers. That's
not the point! If you don't get the point yet, wash, rinse,
and repeat the preceding paragraph.

Commandment 6:
Thou shalt not use too many colors. Thou shalt attempt to
learn something about color harmony.

Commandment 7:
Thou shalt kern thy bitmapped type unless thou wantest to
be known simply as "Shmendric, the Village Design Idiot"

Commandment 8:
Thou shalt look at thy site on a variety of browsers. Just
because you're on a PC using IE 5.5 doesn't mean your users
are. You can't accommodate every browser config for sure,
but it's horrifying how many site submissions we get that
ONLY look good on a PC on IE 5.5.

Commandment 9:
Thou shalt make sure your images are clear, and free of
those dreaded Mad-Cow disease causing jaggies. Jaggies are
not hilarious on your site. On somebody else's site,
jaggies may be hilarious -- but not on your site.

Commandment 10:
Thou shalt not be accused of Flash-love. It's habit forming
and causes hairy palms and blindness. Everything in
moderation grasshopper. Use Flash when it's appropriate.

[ May 19, 2001 04:41 PM: Message edited by: Matt Jacob ]

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Quote
quote:
Hmm, sitting in his car for 6 years? Thats a hell of a foreshadow, considering I don't even think IE 1.0 was out yet. And to think, the napkin FOUND right as IE 5.5 was the current browser!!!

wink


"Annnnnnnndd now, opening for Iron Maiden...... WYLD STALLYNS!!!" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted "Theodore " Logan
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hehehe. hey, i don't write the articles, i just steal 'em and bring them here! laugh but, maybe there was a secret beta of ie5.5 back in 1995?

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you MUST read this: http://web.0sil8.com/episodes/97/12/05/index.html

Just a thought smile

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0sil8 is cool. smile

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11: Thou shalt use plenty of comments in your code such as for Matt shall be immortalized for all time as the Great Prophet of HTML.

laugh

[ May 20, 2001 06:42 PM: Message edited by: navaho ]


Picture perfect penmanship here.
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I wouldn't lose sleep on your site not looking good with a different browser. Considering 95% of the people who surf the web use Internet Explorer.

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PHA,

Even if your statistics were right (and they're not) you would have just alienated 5% of your visitors. Not making cross-browser compatible sites is lazy.

Most sites I've visited that look fine in IE but bad in Opera or NS are actually bad because the webmaster can't write proper HTML, and it isn't because NS doesn't support the latest CSS, or DHTML.

[ May 21, 2001 05:26 AM: Message edited by: CTH ]

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A site that doesn't work in NS is a failed site. A site which looks a bit different is 'ok'.

Just a thought smile

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I type Like navaho
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yep, usually a table problem... would only help rendering speed in IE if the tables were formatted correctly, so your browser doesn't have to figure out what you mean, and cuts down on the number of abusive emails from the NS/Opera crowd smile


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I'm not saying that you shouldn't design your web page to not work with NS or Opera. I am just saying that you should make sure your page looks ok in IE before you worry about the other browsers. In the end my pages usually look great across different browsers, with the exception of Netscape for Linux, theres no hope there. And it's not HTML thats hard to write for cross browser compatibility. It scripting languages that are hard.

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I don't have a problem with Netscape for linux. It's the same rendered as windows (ignoring form fields).

huh?

Just a thought smile

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yeah, huh? I haven't had a problem with Netscape for linux at all when I've used it.
But I use konqueror most of the time.

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huh? x3

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Exactly, buttons, and form fields look like crap.

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Have you even used it? That would be called a deficiency with the shell, not the browser. You might also have noticed that form fields and buttons looks different on windows and macOS. This must surely be a bug in the browser!

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forgive me father but I have sinned
My web site braked only 1 through 10 but that it laugh


Some men live for others and make their presence known
Some men live in seclusion and choose to live alone...
Some men live for justice and walk inside the law
But of these men, the group I'm in
are the men behind the wall...
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Picture perfect penmanship here.
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rofl! all your alt="hi matt!"!! that's some great stuff right there. the penny, err, mark's arcade was my favorite, sorry scats. smile all your alts are belong to me!

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Uh, aren't there s'posed ta be only 10 commandments? hehe

[ May 26, 2001 12:44 PM: Message edited by: -ecliast- ]

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there are ten...

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Quote
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You should be most aware of the 11th, Matt... laugh wink

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Another one to add,

"The best way to find errors in your pages, is to upload it and go live.."

[ June 18, 2001 04:06 PM: Message edited by: JC ]


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pft, navaho's commandments do not count!

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Sure they do, he's Ultimate™ now, remember?


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