I'll throw these ideas out for comment.
1. Don't make the user wait more than 30 seconds for the page. Yes
this means for many of us this means having page/image and all under
40-50K.
2. Don't make backgrounds bigger than about 5K. Netscape won't
display the page until the background is loaded, and I have seen
several multiple connection situations where the background shares
download with other images and it really does take more than a minute
to load.
3. Don't use jargon. Explain your trademarks, servicemarks and
other brand names. Don't put "Meets OSHA 1854a standards" if you
don't explain what those standards are.
4.Don't talk over the user's head. Newspapers write to 8th grade level
or less. Unless we have a specific audience where 85-90% of the people
are college level, we should watch how we say things. Remember, there
are a good portion of 8th grade readers on the Internet anyway - they
are called students.
5. Don't use blink (unless of course you don't want people to read
anything other than the blinking text).
6. Don't create imagemaps where the clickable regions aren't obvious
to a computer neophyte (not a seasoned user). @Home is a good example
of this failing.
7. Don't use such loud backgrounds that the words become difficult
to read.
8. Do sign all of your web pages. Give people a place to let you
know when things go wrong.
9. Don't fill up the opening screen with a logo. A logo isn't
worth 1/2 a screen (full screen on a laptop). I can appreciate our
need to create recognition, but we shouldn't do that at the expense
of the reader that rarely scrolls.
10. Warn users when they are about to download a large (ie < 100K)
file.
11. Don't abuse users by using Microsoft's inline video player in
a continuous loop. Make it start only when the user positions the
cursor over it. This is almost as bad as blink.
12. Do use ALT attributes for all of your images, and make them
intellegent. Putting [image] in as the alternative text for users
that run imageless is redundant and meaningless.
13. Don't make the home page the largest (byte size) page on your
site just to impress people with your coolness.
The big thing to remember about netiquette is that it focuses
on conduct guidelines that don't take advantage of or otherwise
abuse the receipiant. Sort of like the golden rule. If you feel
a need to demonstrate your "coolness" at the expense of the average
user, you aren't a very good netizen.
Remember, cool is *not* synonymous with good. You can have a cool
web page, just like a work of art. Cool is a flash in the pan.
Quality pages are there for the long haul.
<i>&gt; Would issues of "appropriate" content be considered netiquette issues? Why?</i>
Users should be warned of controversial material. There isn't any
reason to keep everything to a high standard of decency. Playboy and
the green card lawyers have just as much right on the web as anyone else.
Users should be warned that they shouldn't click that button if they
don't want the results.
<i>&gt; What about linking to other sites - should they be notified or asked?</i>
Yes they should be notified. Asking permission is still a hazy issue.
A page should be labeled as such if linking to it is prohibited.
<i>&gt; What about the resultant bandwidth/cpu load from a popular site on a</i>
<i>&gt; shared server -- would it be good netiquette to move it to a separate</i>
<i>&gt; server?</i>
That is the ISP's call.
Mary Morris
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