Rich content and Easy Navigation...

Erm, why is it that when ever I see one of those "steps you take to build a website"... SEO/SES is always near the end?

Wrong! SEO starts wit hthe first line of code, as does Validation and Accessibility!
If you're leaving it till near the end, you've wasted far to much time!


Worse, those things are always generic, and tend to be written from a "media" perspective - not from a sales, personal, presentational manner. Nor do they cover niche sites etc.
If you have a site designed and developed for surrealism, I should damn well bet my haddock that it doesn't follow those guidelines! (Unless I'm a sock).


Of course, just to really rock the boat here - anyone been following posters links and checking whether they have money where their mouth is?
Have a go - it's kind of funny!
(Actually, not funny, kind of depressing).

I always found that as long as you have a good base design. title, body, menubar, header, footer, blah, blah, blah any design can go over top of it smoothly and easily. Is that not what CSS was made for. I mean just look at http://www.csszengarden.com/. Recently I have been working with layers which I have found to be one of the most powerful and amazing tool for web design

readable font size and not so *eye blinding* font colors...a motif...well organized body of text...no typo errors, you don't want to end up reading this -> "I kill beers" or "I drink bears"...and oh, no viruses attached...

Clipmarks, so the user can save the pages whose is interested in.

hi
I agree with all of these great suggestions, but in my opinion, it depends on what the website is for, if it is an informant page then readability, but if its to show of your skill you what some (not loads) of cool stuff like mini **chat forums** **suggestion boxs** **local search engines**

Like i said , in my oppinion

No difference - it should always, and I mean always, be well coded, and in almost all circumstances, accessible.

I have seen so many sites with damned clever bits.... and but for ignorance or laziness, it fails to be highly usable and not the slightest accessible.

I admit, I'm not perfect, took a while before I thought of making form elemnts measued in EM for height etc... but so many people claim to be web-site-develoeprs/designers/builders... and have not got a clue.

Still, at least there are some who are willing to learn and improve - such as people on forums such as this!
(Thank god for communities )

Use the font the user wants his browser to display, in the size he has chosen. Remember that some people have chosen large default fonts because they have vision problems.

Don't change the link colors.

Remember that users can block their browsers from allowing font and link changes.

And think that the large font user might wish to scroll your page horizontally, rather than have your lined-up information get separated when the page that doesn't fit falls apart.