Style Your Sheet

mo'fessional pages should have:

Everything on my ProtoPage
An e-mail address
Contact info is a must - every page should have some. Preferably with a <a href="mailto:you@me.com"> tag around it. How else are your readers going to tell you what they think - what you've done wrong and right - and let you know of downed links?
Return links
Strategically speaking, a return link to your top level is a must. Since the web is completetly linkable, seamlessly, people could link into your pages without you ever knowing. Tie your contents together, and you will find that people make numerous back doors into your site.
Neat HTML
Keep things neat and tidy. For yourself, but also because someone else could end up using your page to learn HTML, and you wouldn't want to teach them sloppy style!
Separate Bio Page
It depends on the scope of your page, but if you intend to have a net.magazine of some/any sort, I recommend moving your personal bio info to a separate page. It was a turning point for me.
Sparing byte utilization
Say what you want in as few words as possible, keep your graphics few and small, don't leave extraneous tags laying around. It makes for faster surfing, and happier readers. Remember, whatever speed you surf at, someone is surfing slower.
Too many <blockquote>s
As you may have noticed from my pages, and this one in particular, I like to use <blockquote> tags around most all of my text. It keeps the margins clear, pulls the text narrower, easier for the eyes to digest. It does add length to documents, but past a certain point, it doesn't matter, and compensates with readability!

web.etiquette: People building home pages often write to ask me if it is alright if they link to my pages from theirs. By all means! That's the glory of the web - connecting people to good resources. Permission to link is pretty much a moot issue, since it's the closest thing to advertising on the web - advertising by recommendation. You are doing someone a favour of sorts by sending people their way. So you don't need to ask, but a note to let someone know you've linked to them is a nice gesture.
Whenever I can, I use cross-browser HTML - specifically avoiding Netscape tags. Not everyone on the net uses Netscape, and some, not all, but much of the cool stuff they offer can be done with HTML 3.0 - which is in part supported by the latest versions of both Netscape and Mosaic. For example, you can center your text the NetScape way, or you can center your text in a non-browser specific way.

Return to Getting Started with HTML for more reference materials.

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Links from the Underground

Yer Mama Net Productions / Justin Hall / <justin@cyborgasmic.com>