Bells & Whistles

If you have a "hit counter", remove it. They are a relic from the nineties, and never, ever serve to impress your users. Conversely, listing the number of subscribers to your newsletter can. See Leo's blog to see what I mean.

Ben

Clocks are useful. When you're in a station or walking in the high street - the large clock is genuinely very helpful. Especially if you aren't wearing a watch. So why not put one on your website?

Here's why:

Don't waste space on your website duplicating information that's already on your user's screen.

Ben

Websites are dynamic things. Now that most internet users are on broadband (I'm even on broadband when I'm sitting in a café on on a train), we're able to experience the internet in a fantastic content rich way that we could never have done 5 years ago. YouTube, the iPlayer, .com - all these sites offer sound and video and people love them. They are very popular sites, and we're going to see more like them pop up this year, next year, and forever more.

If content is king, shouldn't we all try and fill our websites with as much text as is humanely possible? Won't that get us the highest ranking in Google? Why don't we just write pages and pages and pages of stuff, as much as we possibly can, and we'll get to number one, won't we? After all Content is King.

Testing to make sure websites work across different browsers is part of the job of making websites. A whole plethora of tiny bits and pieces work different in FireFox than they do in Internet Explorer. In a bid to test a website thoroughly, it's important to review every website you work on in all the major browsers. This includes Safari.

My laptop is neither fast nor slow. It's decidedly average. The only things that's are truly superb on it are the 17" screen and the full sized keyboard with keypad. Apart from that, it's just plain OK.