Their are many factors to take into consideration when created your own personal webpage, or a huge website system such as gaming communitys equiped with systems to upload your custom content.

All these hints are intended for HTML based websites.

Background
One thing to think about is adding some kind of background detail. Whether is be a simple background color, a simple background image. In fact i encourage you to keep it simple to reduce loading times, and to keep from drawing to much attention away from what the site is really intended to do. One thing that i beleive bothers everyone is when their are sites with neon colors everywhere. Please dont use neon colors background, unless you can balance it out and make it look good.

Banners and other images
Keep the file sizes at a low, but make sure they have something in them. Its great to have images, but having empty images makes your site look empty. Even if its just a logo, or your name and the site URL, try and add something.

Text and linking
When your adding alot of content on your site, its always a good idea to make sure the site of everthing is of a decent size, so its easily readable. Nobody likes HUGE text, but their are a few exceptions. An important thing to always keep in mind is that you always want to have the text, and or link against a background where the text and or link will be easily readable, and viewable. Do not put a yellow text color on a white background.

Page Layout and Access
One thing you may want to keep in mind, is that when creating your site you want it to look appealing to the eye, but keep the people interested in what the site is really about. Try and make the site as easily accessible from other pages of the site as possible. For example, have a link to the home page on most, or all of the pages throughout the web page. Its always good to have a little uniqueness to the site, and having a way for people to give feedback. Some of the ways for this would to be add a geustbook, forum, or an email link.

but how could you put a home button on if it cant let you do that

Color scheme for the website is important as well. Not more than 4 main colors and they need to be contrast. If you choose those colors wisely, your site will look professional even its just static. And of course you can have different shades of those 4 colors.



Currently most of those images are in gif format. They are particular small in size. Try not to use animated gif, instead use flash. Those animated gif will only make your site looks 'puffy'.




Page layout is very hard to determine as i'm not a designer myself. Try to look around at some open source web design and pick up some nice layout. But most of them will be using CSS. So you will need some knowledge of it to edit those.

Page layout/design are really important since you don't want text/pictures piled up in a square. That happened to me once, I was only 11 and I programmed a antivirus by then. After that, I started learning HTML/CSS/PHP from scratch. (Note: This is when I was 11 years old)

xxxx-jozh-xxxx

I think that layout of a site is a bigger part then most people think. You need to give credit to people with a good layout on there site. It really does not matter what the site has to offer untill it has a good background. I have found myself click out of a site even before it is completly loaded simply because it has a bad background.
Now jbitkill I don't see how you could have learned to make an anti-virius (Probably C++) then list HTML/CSS/PHP "from scratch" as other major things. Maby it is just me but C++ is much more advanced then any of the web based languages (excluding java). Someone that knew C++ wouldn't need to list HTML/CSS as other major things they knew. I also don't really understand how you get images to pile up in a square unless you were using locations for images? Sorry if I seem questioning.
You have some good advice Soto. Maby your post will stop anouther site from making their default theme (background) black.
Thanks,
Sparkx