First impression / entrance page: Upon entering your home page, your site should catch our attention with its "eye catchy" design.  We should notice at first glance what your site is offering.  Your site should be pleasing to the eyes, offers a nice theme, user friendly navigation and will invite us to browse further. 

Page loading: Your site pages and flash intro's should load within 60 seconds on a standard 56K modem, otherwise you will lose the majority of your visitors. 

Original design, graphics and material:  Here is where we prefer to see something interesting, unique and original with your graphics, layout, buttons, banners and navigation.   Avoid using cheesy clipart, buttons and banners that we have seen on a gazillion other sites before. There are many wonderful graphic programs on the internet that can assist you in creating beautiful graphics, buttons, banner and backgrounds, as well as edit and add special affects to graphics you may already have.  We offer several links on our "Webmaster Tools" link.  (see our navigation)

Themes / color balance:  A theme is a consistent set of design elements and color schemes that you may apply to pages to give them a attractive and unified appearance. Using a theme is a quick and easy way to add interest to pages and give them a professional look.

A theme affects all aspects of a page's appearance:
Colors. A theme uses a color scheme to set the color of body text, headings, hyperlinks, banners, navigation bars, table borders and the page background. You can use normal primary or vivid color schemes.  Colors should be consistent on all your pages.
Graphics. A theme uses graphics for several page elements, such as the background picture,  banners, bullets, navigation buttons, and horizontal lines.
Styles. A theme uses its own styles (fonts) for the body text and headings.  Avoid using fancy fonts, for not all browsers support fancy fonts.  The most commonly used fonts accepted by most browsers are Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana.

Clear graphics: Nice clean, clear, graphics, with no visible outlines, make a good impression on your visitors.  Avoid using transparent .gifs which show outlines when used with dark backgrounds.  JPEG(s)- graphic file format,  are used to display high resolution color graphics on the World Wide Web, while .gif  graphics are simple  file formats for basic or primary colors.  Tip: saving a graphic more then once will distort an image.
 

Optimized graphics: Busy or large backgrounds, heavy text and messy graphics with outlines, are unpleasing to your visitors. Large graphics are the most common cause of web pages that load slow.  Try to optimize your graphics as much as possible.  If displaying large graphics in numbers, for example: photos galleries, wallpaper, etc., you might want to create thumbnails.  You can also greatly reduce loading time for large graphics by slicing the images. 

Graphics uploaded correctly to your web: Missing graphics are the worst thing you can see on a website.  Make sure your site does not have empty boxes which should have a graphic in its place. Check that your graphics have been uploaded accordingly to the correct file on your web.  

Tables aligned correctly: Use careful use of the ALIGN attribute in your TABLE tags. (Otherwise, errors are most likely to pop up, or the dreaded horizontal scroll bar).  Set your table settings at 100 percent when centering, which will allow your page to expand or decrease to be viewable in most browsers without horizontal scrolling.  You might want to consider using, Cascading style sheets.

Browser settings / horizontal scroll bars: We should be able to view your site in both 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution, without a visible horizontal scroll.  Keep in mind that most computers, bought, sold and owned have pre-settings of 800 x 600 resolutions.   Test out your site in various screen sizes from anybrowser.com screen test.

Utilize space: Websites which show big gaps (white space) on pages are not pleasing to the eye and causes un-necessary scrolling.    

Use ALT tags: ALT tags should be in  place with the use of  for your graphics. ALT Tags are used to name your graphics, while hovering over them. ***Click here for additional information. (Popup Window)***

Midi's should have a turn off button:  Music can be a wonderful feature on a page, especially if its related to your sites theme or content.  However,  upon returning to the same page (example: your home page with music), it can get rather annoying to hear the same tune over and over, each time we return to the same page.  If using music or midis, please provide a way to shut them off.  Exceptions are flash sites that have incorporated music into their intro or presentation of their site.   

Frame sites should not open another's web: If using frames, you should target your links unrelated to your site as "_target blank", so you do not open another website unrelated to yours within your frames. This is a courtesy to other webmasters and designers.  

"Skip intro" for flash introductions: If your site uses a "Flash Introduction", please provide a "skip intro" link or button.  Some visitors may not have the appropriate plug ins, to view your flash, or they could be using a slow modem.  

Flash sites must load in a reasonable time: We will allow up to 90 seconds for flash sites to load on a standard 56K modem and 60 seconds for cable modem. 

Last impression:   Did we learn anything from your site? Did your site provide interesting or informative content?  Were we impressed with the layout and design?  Did we understand the purpose of your website?  Was there anything unique that made your site stand out from other sites?  Did your site offer us anything that would make us want to come back for another a visit?