The more specifically you can catalogue the needs of the people reading your web pages, the better you'll be able to meet those needs.
¥ Who will be using your pages?
Students?
Teachers?
People familiar with your subject matter?
People just learning the things you will be discussing?
The amount of prior knowledge your audience has of your chosen subject matter will dictate how much background information you need to provide, and extent to which you must clearly define and explain your terminology.
¥ Answer the question "what problem is my reader trying to solve?"
If your documents will be read by a certain population, familiarize yourself with the particular groups that will find your information useful, and the problems that they will be attempting to solve as they read your pages. Even if your pages are destined only for use within organization, you should try to do a similar categorization of the potential readers of your pages.
¥ What is the bandwidth of their internet connection?
Generally, the slower the link over which your reader will be retrieving your web pages, the more important it is that you maximize "value" and usable content, and minimize document size and load time. Most of the differences between design for web-based media and design for more common computer and traditional media design revolve around perceived performance, and the ways in which the performance unpredictability of internet connections will affect your audience's perception of your product quality. The degree to which you use graphics, the size of your images and overall pages, and the way in which you partition your information will be perceived differently depending on the speed and quality of a reader's internet connection.
¥ Test every link.
¥ Verify your HTML syntax and construction.
Until there are reliable WYSIWYG tools for creating HTML pages, use a utility to check your formatting. Yahoo provides a good starting point for finding tools.
¥ Keep your pages up-to-date.
Check regularly for external links that don't connect. To preserve your sanity, if you're maintaining a sizable web, explore using an automated mechanism to do your link checking. MOMspider is a publicly available example of such a tool.
¥ Check your spelling.
If you're fortunate enough to be creating HTML pages in an editor with a spell-checker, please use it. Otherwise, dump the text to someplace where you can check it for errors.
¥ Write well!
Edit your documents or get someone to edit them for you.
¥ Write for all browsers, not just Netscape or HotJava.
If you are creating pages that must be interpreted with a particular browser to be useful to your audience, be very certain that your audience is using the browser you expect. Don't use special features gratuitously. People usually value content over overtly clever format and flash.
¥ Put as much content towards the top of a hierarchy as is possible.
When creating a web offering that lends itself to a hierarchical style of organization, it's fairly easy to arrive at a presentation that requires a person to navigate several thinly populated "menu" or "index" pages before they get to real information. It is beneficial to "flatten" your hierarchy, providing more information sooner. In addition, try to avoid value-free intermediate pages.
¥ Provide useful content on each page seen by your audience.
Given that at least two levels of hierarchy are probably unavoidable (a top level
index, and second-level content pages,) try to provide valuable content on your
top-level page.
¥ Provide value that gets people to add your offering to their bookmark list.
One measure of success for web pages is getting people to put your page on their "hotlist" or list of bookmarks. The richer your pages are in needed information, the more likely people will be to return to them.
¥ Pare down your text.
People sometimes don't like to read web pages. They will skip over text that they consider non-essential. They don't like to scroll. Often, they will skim your text, only reading the text of the hypertext links before they choose their next destination The pages that seem be the most successful are those that use a "bursty" style. Short, factual, well-written, prose with interesting links seems to attract the biggest audience.
¥ Don't assume that all your readers will use the same browser features and
defaults as you do.
Visually impaired users may have selected much larger fonts. Many users will turn off backgrounds, and color and font over-rides. Browsers differ in how they implement rendering of white-space. Some browers will give end users far greater control over the use of colors, fonts, spacing and other presentation attributes. A classic abuse of headers is to use H5 or H6 to mean "smaller font," which is not what the HTML specification defines or what some browsers implement.
¥ Date your pages.
This provides version and revision information and is an indicatior of information currency.
¥ Don’t use the “blink” feature! ('nuff said!)
¥ Put a link to a comment mechanism.
This can be a mailto: link so your audience can send you comments. Be sure to respond to feedback.
A few things that your mother probably told you, but bear repeating. Don't insult or flame people. Only post things in good taste. No chain letters, derisive comments or inflammatory remarks.
Don't publish copyrighted material without the permission of the owner. Get explicit, written permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If you're going to be giving your content to someone else to maintain, Make sure the permissions get handed over with the documents. Brad Templeton's Ten Big Myths about copyright explained is a must read. Take care in using trademarks. Do not reproduce trademarks or trademarked logos if there is a possibility of someone attributing your product to the owner of the trademark or logo.
Don't publish links to someone else's pages unless you know that they want that exposure. While many documents you will encounter are meant to be re- used and linked-to, some aren't. Unless it's very obvious that the author of the document in question is creating a public resource, ask for permission before creating a link.
Give people constructive feedback on the documents you read. Sadly, the mail links that appear on the bottom of many documents are rarely used. It might say "webmaster" on the link, but every document you see (yes, even the script-generated stuff) was conceived and executed by a person. Send mail. Tell them what you liked and disliked. Be a mensch.
Give back to the Net. Try to publish documents that provide value to a broader audience than just your design center. As a distribution medium, the web can provide a channel for specialized content that would be an economic impossibility in other media. However, many sites that claim to cater to very specific audiences have information with a much broader appeal, or information which, if only slightly enhanced or re-organized, would be useful to a much larger constituency. Once you've defined your target audience, and created the perfect site for their needs, try to find low-effort changes that might enlarge the group of readers who will find your information useful. Strive for elegance and clarity. Publish things that solve peoples' problems.