Tips for your site

Before you read this you must know that anything I say on this page is my personal opinion, so that means that I'm not going to have to justify my opinion although I will try and give you a good reason why or why not to do something.

Style

Always be original, because if not people will see your site as being boring and not worth it. If you can have your own style, your own way of making content, layouts, etc... Then it's more likely that people will see your website as a site worth visiting. Never steal the way someone else does something or their actual content, it's stealing and it's stupid. And you could also get a bad reputation

Navigation

This is a bit of personal subject because different sites may say different things, so this is one thing that is a bit more about what you like. Me I find there's two kinds of navigation, the one that I have which is with just a few links (ex: blog, content, site). Then there's the one where your sidebar has all or almost all the links on it. So it's just whatever you like but where I find some people go wrong is naming your pages. As for the names i really think it's a good idea to spell properly and to send a clear message about what that page will have in it.

Colors

This is something that can sometimes become a talent when it comes to knowing what colors to have in your layout and css. First of all never have bright colors! And I know that at the moment I'm not very good at being colorful but that's something I know you should do and I know I need to improve on this too. Remember not too bright but still colorful.

Font: Obviously you should never have a font size too small and mine is about the smallest, some people prefer it one or two sizes bigger than mine and that's good too. I know I mentioned it just adov here but always make sure that all of your font is readable! I actually went to a website recently and I had to highlight some text because it was almost the same color as the background. This is a huge no no.

Content

I think that quality is deffinetly better than quantity. When I look at a site, i'll look at their content but if I see a lot of nothing then i'll just give up. It really makes your site look bad when your content is bad. I think that you should also make sure your content is convenient for people. When someone has brushes and you click download I hope/want a pop for a download for photoshop instead of a ziping file, because it's convenient. But I know many people will zip them for other reasons. But the main idea of this paragraph is never make and put something on your site that you wouldn't use yourself or that you can't find a use for, and also to never have content that doesn't look good.

Affiliates

This is something very good for a website for a few reasons. One reason is that if your site's not that popular it'll help you get more visitors. Reason two is that your affiliates will comment(if they're good ones) and it might create sort of a nice"communitee" type thing, which is really fun. In my opinion it's also sometimes nice to be helping other sites with there visitors and it's just generally a fun thing to have. If your affies never comment at all or update for that matter than I think they should be deleted or at least not on the top affiliates section. When you have an affiliates application form or whatever you need to have rules because this way you clearly tell these poeple what you expect of them as affiliates.

Blogging

Blogging is something I find a lot of people make mistakes with. Common mistakes are making them way too short, making every blog only about one subject or only about the person's website. It's important to also make as few spelling mistakes as possible because wehn uoy ave ot reda lik this all the time it gets annoying and it looks very unproffesional. I make spelling mistakes very often so what I sometimes do is once I've made the blog entry I read it over once or twice to look for the spelling mistakes and sometimes I also find that some of the sentences are a bit hard to read so I change those ones. Have you ever thought to yourself oooo, I got to blog about this next time and then you completely forget when the times comes to blog. I find this happens quite often and it's very annoying, one small thing I do to prevent forgeting it is I think about it once or twice. You can also write it down if that works for you.

Sidebars:

Some people I'm finding lately have a hard time with only having one or two sidebars. Recently I've seen websites with up to four sidebars and this looks very messy and should be limited to one sidebar and then a small one with the list of affiliates. On the topic of sidebars and tables well I've also seen websites who don't know how to align their tables/sidbar with everything else, this just makes everything look very messy and should be fixed a.s.a.p.

Commenting:

So many people are still going wrong here. Never and I repeat never comment saying "cool layout, I love the colors". This is extremely rude and it really doesn't make somebody want to reply and anybody could of said that, but to comment about the actual blog entry takes someone willing to read the blog. This happened to me once and when I was replying to other comments I noticed that the same person said just about the same thing to someone else. Anyway, the point is that you should try to make your comment as long as possible to show that it's worth the owner reading.

Credits

This is a big issue I find. You must credit all the sites which you used content of any kind from. Reason one being that it's extremely rude to not give credit because a lot people put a lot of work into their content and then if you use it and don't credit, that's stealing. Of course if you just download a few brushes or something and you forgot to give credit. Then the person tells you that you took something of theres, then that's okay if the reason was that you forgot. But if not then no, it's not okay. So I think that no matter what website you have you must always have a credits page. And if it's something very specific you want to credit about then I would do that one the page where i'm putting the content. For instance I've credited killinginthename.com on my icon textures page for the tutorial he has.

Last updated: March 30th 2008