Remember when desktop publishing first surfaced, and people loaded up their documents with 20 different fonts just because they could? That's called "design bloat," and the opportunity to repeat those excesses and even magnify them lies wide open before you as you embark on your first attempts at a World Wide Web home page.

Of course, the best way to get an idea of what you want to do with your personal digital space is to first visit a lot of other people's Web homes. Spend some time visiting the pages of your friends, business associates, online compadres, and the bigger commercial sites. Follow your interests, and then when creating your page(s), your instincts. Everybody has a little creativity inside them—just try not to overdo it.

Along those lines, we offer the following suggestions, a summary of tips from around the Web and based in part on "Design & Page Layout" by Paul M. Allen. Paul contributes advice from what his Web-site development firm, PMA Technology Group, has discovered "by trial and error [in terms of] what works on the computer screen and what doesn't." Off we go...

When using headlines, stick to the smaller sizes. The three largest headline sizes "display a lot larger on a Mosaic viewer" than in Netscape or Internet Explorer, says Allen.

Don't use italics too often. They can be very hard to read  when used in regular text, and nearly impossible to decipher at smaller font sizes. Boldfacing italicized type  (or simply boldfacing instead) will help legibility.

Use centering liberally. You don't have many formatting tools available to you on the Web, and this is a good one.

Replace the standard grey background to give your page a more contemporary look. "White is a safe choice," says Allen, although that color will give horizontal rules on the page a "tail" on the left side (use text characters, such as a series of underlined spaces _____, as a separator instead). Other background colors are more difficult to work with since they have a noticable impact on other page elements (especially transparent GIF images).

Don't use textured backgrounds that are too busy. "Like italics, most make the text harder to read," Allen advises.

Changing link colors? If you're bothering to alter the colors of visited and unvisited links (it's not recommended—most Web users have grown comfortable with the default red-blue values), at least sync them up with colors occurring in images you've used on the page. And keep link colors consistent across multiple pages.

Have a hot date? Web surfers really appreciate knowing whether the info they're perusing is fresh stuff or moldy bread. Somewhere on your home page, let users know when the page was last updated. If you don't have a lot of content needing refreshment, try and get some.

Show file sizes. Are you offering a humongous video or compressed piece of shareware for download on your page? List the file type and size next to the link (for example: QuickTime MOV, 5.5 MB), so those with slower modems aren't left wondering just how long this file retrieval is going to take.

Your opening graphic should display fully on the user's screen without scrolling—that means nothing larger than 640 x 480 pixels. "Always assume that a user's browser will be on its default settings at it smallest size vertically," says Allen.

Reuse graphics such as title banners. Once downloaded, they're stored in a memory cache, so if they're called to use on another page, they're displayed from memory and don't have to be downloaded again.

Always ALT! Some browsers display small windows where yet-to-be-downloaded images will be laid out on the page. ALT information, which is easily entered using CompuServe's Home Page Wizard and describes the image's contents (for example: My dog Buster), gives Web surfers something to look at while your pictures trickle down the pipe.

Keep graphics as simple and small as possible. Remember that computer screens are low in resolution compared to the quality of a print magazine, so things that might work in that medium won't translate to the Web, where 256 colors are the standard. Most current PCs can actually display millions of colors, but their users often don't run them at higher resolutions to keep the machine speedy. After you've uploaded your page, log on with a browser and time how long it takes for an opening graphic or the entire page to load. If it's too long, make adjustments to get the size of your graphics (or the number of graphics on the page) down. If you're logging on at 28.8, double the time and think about what someone coming in to your page on a 14.4 modem is going through. "If you have something that might take several minutes to transfer, it better be worth the time the user spends waiting to see it," says Allen.

Make hot buttons look hot. If you're using images as hotlinks, and are removing the colored border that identifies them as links (using the HTML image command BORDER=0), do something to distinguish them from images on the page that aren't clickable links. Cautions Allen: "The user shouldn't have to try to figure out what's hot and what's not."

Be cognizant of color. If you're scanning personal images for use on your page, plan on spending a lot of time fine-tuning them. Make sure all images on the same page share a common palette. If you use a custom palette, it should include the 16 colors that Windows uses. "If the image isn't transparent," adds Allen, "putting some type of border around it will usually give the page it is on a more finished look."

Lower the resolution on scanned graphics, too. Windows machines can't display anything higher than 96 dpi (dots per inch), so saving graphics at 150 or 300 dpi is overkill, and will make them too large to download anyway.

Wrap text around images that are less than half as wide as the display area. The text may not wrap in all browsers, but at least you've added the feature for those who can take advantage of it.

Crop! Nothing's worse than a 200K graphic that contains 25K of information. Use a graphic-manipulation program not only to improve color and contrast, but also to edit out parts of a picture that don't relate anything useful. If it's an image of your house, remember that the world already knows what sky and grass looks like.

Got dithering? If you have dithered colors (a washed-out, grainy look to graphics) when you test your page on a Netscape browser, you're using colors Netscape doesn't recognize. Adjust your palette to the Netscape values for the offending colors. You can download the table listing acceptable color values from Netscape's web site.

GIF vs. JPEG? Save your images as JPEGs when they are continuous-tone (read: photographs). JPEG files will compress to a smaller size and generally look better than GIFs of the same image. GIF should be used only for line-art images such as screen shots and logos created in a paint program.

Don't use "Under Construction" graphics. Just go with what you have. Web pages, if you haven't noticed, are always under construction.

No moving experiences, please. Scrolling text, marquees, and some animated GIFs chew up just enough processor time to make interacting with a page annoying. And blinking text is widely regarded on the Net as "just plain evil."

Get "back," man. If your site is composed of multiple pages (HTML documents), include links on every page that return users to the master page with its table of contents. Such "orphan" pages can be confusing if a Web surfer bypasses your home page and hits one of your secondary pages directly.

Yes, frames are cool. But. Bookmarking a particular page within the "frameset" for future reference becomes impossible, as does printing of the page. Be original: have a really good reason to use frames.

Break it up. As you might guess, a very small percentage of people ever bother to scroll an unfamiliar page to see what's further down, unless it contains information they really need. (Thanks for joining us down here, by the way!) Put all of your navigation functions and gee-whiz info on the top part of the page, and move long passages of text across multiple pages, so readers feel as though they're "getting" somewhere.

It's the browser, stupid. Whether your page is viewed in Netscape or Internet Explorer or some flavor of Mosaic ultimately determines what it will look like. If you are using Netscape-only HTML commands (like centering, text wrap around images, and backgrounds), some viewers will ignore them. Try viewing your page in Netscape, Internet Explorer, and the Spry Mosaic browser in WinCIM 2.0.1 to get a feel for what happens, and then adjust your design to achieve the best compromise. If you use a 17-inch or larger monitor, also test your design on a computer with a standard 14-inch screen just to be certain.

Fine tune the thing to death. After all, you can. "A word or two more or less in a key location will change the way the copy lays out on the screen, and a little more or less height —maybe 2 or 3 pixels—on a graphic can frequently clean things up considerably," says Allen. "It's the little things that count."