Yup – here’s the cynical basics on how to make your pet’s page look good –
without giving anyone a headache. Nothin’ too fancy here, you know, just seven
biting Dos and Donts.
Here goes!
1. Breathe – Blank space can actually be your friend. Try not to overwhelm
you visitor with a ton of graphics and images and sound. It's ineffective. It
actually discourages people from looking at the page. I end up getting dizzy
looking at very busy pages, so cut back on clutter, and link to other places
instead of putting it all in one place.
2. Silence is Golden – Basically, cut back on sound. A few, carefully selected
effects are OK, but have places where people click and the sounds plays, so
they can turn it off. Avoid constantly running music all together. It's typically
in MIDI, which doesn’t sound very pretty, and makes my computer REALLY slow,
which is not fun. Personally, I just don’t want to hear someone else’s music.
3. Links – Yes, back to them. Links are definitely your friend. Scrolling down
for all eternity is not fun. So don’t make people do it. Put links to interesting
things so people can jump around instead of scrolling.
4. Short, sweet, and simple – Don’t spend all day adding meaningless fluff
so that you can have text. Get to the point. People don’t want to read through
paragraphs of repetition, so don’t make them. Say it and move on.
5. Bleep Borders on Backgrounds – I know, you’re saying “huh?” I just like
alliteration (or have you noticed that?). Well, here’s what I mean: Say you
have a complicated drawing of a green Shoyru in the background. It looks fine
like that. Don’t put on extra Shoyru borders everywhere. The drawing says enough.
If you want to have a border, put it on a plain, simple background. It goes
back to what I said about clutter.
6. Pop-ups – Avoid at all costs. These bug the heck out of me. People don't
like opening up people's pages and hearing that beep and guess what? Now there’s
a little gray box with some message and every time I put my mouse in the center
of the page, it opens again! This is not the way to get happy page viewers.
7. Last but not least, express yourself. Try to make your page say “Hey! This
is my pet and they rock!” Get excited. Just, keep it simple. Believe me, we’ll
think your pets are great even if your HTML is limited.
Hope you have fun! So go spruce up you pet’s page. If you need help, the HTML
guide under “Help” (see left toolbar) is a great place to go.
Ask yourself, "Does this look to cluttered?" |